In August, Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker got matching arm tattoos that read “Born With Horns,” the title of Kelly’s upcoming album. But in a TikTok video posted Monday, Kelly confessed to Barker, the album’s executive producer, that he’s changing the LP’s title to “Mainstream Sellout.”
Kelly prefaces the video by asking Barker, “We’re friends no matter what, right?” He then says, “Remember when we got the new album name tattooed on our arms?” Before Kelly can even confess the new title, Barker buckles over in laugher and says, “You changed it…”
In October, Kelly told Variety that his next album, expected some time this year, will be “more guitar-heavy” than 2020’s “Tickets to My Downfall,” which signaled the artist’s full-fledged pivot to pop-punk.
“Lyrically, if ‘Tickets to My Downfall’ was metaphorically high school, then [‘Mainstream Sellout’] is college,” Kelly said. “And I think like, in high school, you don’t really have a sense of responsibility, you have a fear of that responsibility, and so you want to explode and use all that energy for fucking off. And then college comes, which is this album, and you are aware of the responsibility and you still know how to have fun, but you understand that there’s a certain duty you have to your life to do something with it.”
The artist added that “Mainstream Sellout” “feels like it has an objective or a real lesson that you’re walking away with.”
Kelly dropped the first single of “Mainstream Sellout,” titled “Papercuts,” back in August. Most recently, the artist was featured on Iann Dior’s latest album, “On to Better Things,” alongside Barker.
@machinegunkelly my bad @travisbarker