Pop-punk crusaders Magnolia Park introduce a new world with their ambitious concept album, ‘VAMP.’
Stream: “SHADOW TALK” – Magnolia Park
Magnolia Park continue to keep fans on their toes with their unpredictability.
The Floridian band expertly blends sounds and genres at their whim, ranging from trap beats to classic nu-metal guitar. Their love for music drives them to create truly unique sounds, and they are constantly evolving, never staying in one genre for too long, making it impossible to pin them down. Starting from humble beginnings covering songs on TikTok, the band has risen to impressive heights, firmly claiming their space in the pop-punk throne room.
Today, they are celebrated for their extensive musical talent and larger-than-life performances. Having shared the stage with many of their heroes, the band is firmly positioning themselves as icons for the new generation of pop-punk musicians, showcasing their versatility and innovation with every guitar riff and vocal performance.
Their highly anticipated fourth studio album, VAMP (out April 11th via Epitaph), raises the stakes by delving into darker themes and featuring heavier instrumentation. The band expands its sonic landscape with powerful guitar riffs and intense vocals previously absent from many of their songs. This shift in sound began in Australia, where they decided to revisit the heavier elements of their earlier work, Halloween Mixtape II, embracing a ferocity that excites both the band and their fans.
In addition to their musical prowess, the band excels at world-building, infusing the album with lore-based characters and storylines that deeply resonate with listeners. The narrative of VAMP is richly immersive and seamlessly fits into the larger lore of Nocturne Nexus, a fictional world “where rulers and rebels battle with the future hanging in the balance.”
Merging their deep passion for anime and sci-fi, the band created characters like Aurora X1 and her Shadow Breakers, along with their fight to integrate the shadow realm with the physical world. This album is not just about the music; it is an ambitious journey through the band’s creative psyche, reflecting their growth and ability to captivate audiences.
Below, Atwood Magazine dives into the world of VAMP and the influences that brought Nocturne Nexus to life with Magnolia Park’s vocalist Joshua Roberts and guitarist Tristan Torres.
— —
:: stream/purchase VAMP here ::
:: connect with Magnolia Park here ::
— —
Stream: ‘VAMP’ – Magnolia Park
A CONVERSATION WITH MAGNOLIA PARK
— —
Atwood Magazine: What kind of personal experiences did you have to pull from if any to make that whole world of Nocturne Nexus come to life?
Tristan Torres: We just really love anime. From the start, I think me, Josh, and Freddy, especially, bonded over our love for cartoons and anime. So, I think just growing up watching anime.
Joshua Roberts: We wanted to do that one day
Torres: Yeah, it’s like a personal thing [to] tell our own story through the music. My dad, he was an animator for Disney for a time and some other stuff. So, seeing that really inspired me as a kid to do something like this for sure.
What I've been calling it is the MPU, the Magnolia Park Universe. You have all these other characters Baku and TV Head. How do those characters from your earlier albums mesh with the world you’ve created for this one?
Roberts: So, basically TV Head, Baku, Pumpkin Eater, like all these other characters they’re in this almost nether realm of what it is. So, right now we’re on phase two of this. In phase two you get to see this whole other side of the world that we’re creating the not-so-whimsical and not-so-fun side.
While on the other side, in phase one, it was more like the fun characters and stuff like that. So things are going to start colliding a little bit here and there and you get to figure out which character is really what character from the past and stuff like that. So, it’s a lot of twists and turns that are going to be happening.
Torres: There are Easter eggs we planted in some of the drawings, and I think in the slums you can see Baku’s bruise, and then in some of the pictures you can see Houdini’s Emporium, magic shop. So we’re colliding the worlds and giving them little Easter eggs for fans to find for sure.
How many phases are there going to be, do you think?
Torres: Really we’re taking our time. This is really for the fans because we wanted the fans to be connected to a world and feel more invested than just music and band members and whatever.
It started off with Baku and the Halloween mixtape series. We’re going to develop this world and see how far we can take that and then kind of jump in between the Halloween mixtape and the Vamp series.
I think what’s cool about us is that we’re very creative people and we’ll like maybe even come up with a newer story to line them up together. So, we just want to give more than an album most of the time.
With that, I feel like with everything that you're doing with the storylines, the lore and the music it can be kind of hard to balance that and be like we are still a band. How do you make sure that you maintain that balance?
Roberts: Well, music comes first before anything. We want to make sure the music is right. And we want to make sure that everyone’s happy with the music. And then after that, after all the music is boxed up into a nice little bow, we go, all right, cool. How can we expand our vision from what we’ve been creating musically? How can we do that visually? And I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job with just making sure the music comes first and after that we kind of build from what the music is sitting at. So, that’s kind of like how we’ve been doing it.
With your earlier work Vacant, It was way more of a pop-punk kind of vibe and you're definitely going way harder with the screaming on this album. Was that an intentional decision or did it just kind of flow with your ideas?
Torres: Yeah, like Josh was saying [music] is the most important thing. So, we want to write music and we always have written music that we feel very passionate about. Even in the past, we’ve had songs like “Reaper,” which had a heavy tinge, or like “Tokyo,” which was very dancey [and more] pop and we’ve done EDM songs. So I don’t think we’re genre-bound. I think we just like to do what we’re passionate about and then we know if we love it, someone out there is going to like it.
Roberts: Yeah, and especially with us we also keep some of the older tendencies in our newer music. Like our last song [on the album], “Ophelia,” it’s a callback to Vacant. Which is funny. So, we’re always doing something that is reminiscent of what we’ve used to do but we’re also growing. So, we always want to keep that past relevant but still moving on from it at the same time.
Other than screaming and the pop-punk aspects to your music throughout your whole discography there are hip-hop and rap elements as well. Was there ever a learning curve?
Torres: Yeah, it took us it took us a while. After Vacant, our first EP, we started making instrumentals that had hip hop tinging and that was really not happening yet in pop-punk, maybe nothing, nowhere was what we were referencing at the time, but we just wanted to do stuff we were passionate about.
We all love hip-hop. We all love the whole culture of that and we want to bring that to pop-punk and emo. So we just had to figure out how to make that [work]. It started with “Sick of It All” and then I think “Outside,” that song had the first hip-hop-like trap beats. We’re just evolving, and we even have a Jersey Club Beat in “Animal.” We just do weird sh*t that we like that we think oh this will be sick.
Roberts: This album coming out we have more like a European club drop, so that’s cool.
Torres: We have a lot of craziness. We just love music I think. We’re just music nerds so.
The last song on the album is “Ophelia.” It kind of ends on this kind of gut-wrenching point where they ask the question over and over, “Where do we go when we die?” What was your intention with that lyric and what do you want the fans to have left behind with that?
Torres: When we were writing [the song], Vince was in Germany while we were in the studio. He sent me a demo that included “Pumpkin Eater,” an old song of ours from the Vacant EP because he really loves that song we were going to Nashville as well so me, Josh, Katie, and Andy had this concept. I’ve dealt with a lot of like losing friends to suicide and stuff like that. And at the same time, we were writing my grandmother was in hospice. So it was just a lot of death on my mind.
So, me and Josh built off that concept and we just wanted it to be more like a call when you’re very sad and you miss someone. You wish they were there. You’re kind of reaching out, I think. Like, tell me where you are instead of answering the question you just looking for them. You know?
I think that this album does play a lot with the idea of life and death even with vampires kind of being the focus a little bit. So I feel like that makes perfect sense. Do you feel like it was a catharsis kind of getting that out onto the paper and dealing with those ideas as they were happening?
Torres: Yeah, we’re just going through creating something which it’s not like you create it in a day. You just have to figure it out and then the pieces come together. So, the whole vampire thing like I said earlier came from wanting us to do something where fans feel a part of something and that was very important to us like going in.
Before we started the album, we did a Vampires meetup. We were just making like the Vampires a community of a safe place for our fans and just like so they can feel part of it.
Roberts: Not only our fans but like a safe place for the community. We do a lot of community outreach and stuff like that as well. So we want to make sure that we had a group that people can also feel safe but also like to help others as well and not feel alone in tough times. Especially in 2025, there’s a lot of tough times happening right now. So, you wanted something that people can really hold on to for a good reason instead of a negative reason that can be happening.
Torres: Yeah, Vamp and the Vampires idea kind of collided into that, and then it just kind of clicked into like making this whole album theme, but we really write the music first, and then we locked in like towards the end, like the music and the story like colliding perfectly. It was just like a lot of puzzle pieces trying to fit together for sure. Especially doing the new genre.
Roberts: It’s a big leap. It’s a big leap on many other levels, not just musically but just overall feeling, vibe, everything.
— —
:: stream/purchase VAMP here ::
:: connect with Magnolia Park here ::
— —
“Shallow” – Magnolia Park
— — — —
Connect to Magnolia Park on
Facebook, 𝕏, TikTok, Instagram
Discover new music on Atwood Magazine
© Jonathan Weiner
© Jonathan WeinerVAMP
an album by Magnolia Park
