If you missed guitars, Jovi Skyler’s Unpopular is about to scratch that itch.
Always on focus, the vocals in it don’t care at all about pitch perfection or being overly polished. Instead, they lean into a raw, almost exposed fragility. The delivery in many cases sits up in a higher register, giving off this cool, glam-rock revival vibe without sounding though like a cheap costume.
Then there is that old-school 90s push-and-pull between clarity and thick, overdriven fuzz that runs through the whole record. But it doesn’t just blindly copy the basic “quiet verse, loud chorus” pattern. It does mess with the pacing. Plus, the guitars are hardly ever just a single lazy wall of noise. You can tell there was work done for frequency separation, letting the clean parts keep all that nice, crisp note articulation, while the distorted tracks wrap around it like a big, fuzzy, satisfying blanket.
The hints to the Seattle sound and the signatures patterns, you’ll spot it right away. Just click play on the intro of “Outcast”, with this melodic, pissed-off chord progression built specifically for a mosh pit, sounding almost like some long-lost tape found in a Seattle rehearsal space from the winter of 1991. And honestly, the music video for “DEAD ROCKSTARS” nails that exact aesthetic without looking like it’s trying too hard, definitely worth a watch.
Now, I’m talking a lot about the heaviness, but don’t get the wrong idea, it doesn’t come at the expense of the actual songwriting. The tracks don’t just survive on heavy guitars and atmosphere. There are plenty of delicate, winding guitar melodies hiding underneath that counter the main delivery in all the right ways. And the hooks may sound simple yet they are never simplistic. Adding to that, there are moments where the songwriting takes a deep into this old-school psychedelia that totally won us over. By the time the record ends, you’re left sitting there wondering what decade you should file the album under (not that you really need to do that, just for the hell of it).
Ultimately, the production holds together tight. The core ingredients stay consistent from track to track, meaning there are no surprising elements, no weird left turns, and zero nasty “try-hard” moments just to shock you. It just flows.
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