People are going to talk about Hobo Johnson for a long time. Whether you love him or hate him, there’s something to say about him. He’s one of the most unapologetically in-your-face artists in recent times and if you thought his last album The Rise Of Hobo Johnson was outlandish then strap yourself in for Typical Story.
Typical Story was his first single of the year and ushers us into a new Hobo era - one where he’s more chaotic, confused and complicated than ever. It’s a punk-inspired cut that lands him somewhere between Yungblud and an American version of The Streets. He ebbs and flows between rapping and spoken word as he tries to come to some resolve about this world that we live in. You’ve never heard the guitars howl like this on a Hobo track and you’ve also never heard him scream like he does here.
Hobo is coming up in a generation where memes are the main source of success and entertainment. There’s the good side - like going viral off a fake NPR Tiny Desk video only to end up doing the real deal once your career blows up - and then there’s the harsh reality that they’re really attempting to bring humour into a myriad of depressing issues (Brexit, Trump, climate change). He understands this and as a result his music often falls somewhere between nihilism and humour.
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On Typical Story, he falls closer towards the former than ever before. He takes the “fuck,” that stopped us in our tracks on Jesus Christ and amplifies it. Over frantic guitars, Hobo races at a hectic pace offering up a number of stories that really aren’t all that typical at all. Here’s a sample:
- “The bassist kills the singer and the guitarist and the drummer find they’re in love with each other.”
- “The Dad who decides to chase his dream, he quits his job and starts to fall apart.”
- “The story of the dog who wanted to run away until he realised he was much safer in a cage.”
- “The wife who couldn’t quit being in love with such a giant piece of shit.”
Throughout the song he covers abuse, equality, purpose and freedom. They’re difficult topics to cover in such a concise amount of time but this is Hobo dishing out his thoughts unfiltered. He’s at his most unhinged, allowing his mind to race ahead at an unsettling pace.
When the music calms and he’s given time to slow down he declares, “calm to me is unsettling.” We perhaps could’ve guessed that from his last two albums but it’s never more clear than it is here. He scraps the calm almost immediately as he ushers the song into its most powerful question - “Why did you put me here just to die?” He’s sounded anxious before but this time around he’s beyond that. Gazing across to a different genre, Halsey has done a similar thing moving from the clean, trap-inspired Without You to the thrashing Nightmare - one of the most hellish songs to grace the mainstream recently.
Stylistically, Typical Story is looser than ever. We’re given hip-hop tinged verses that are then torn apart by growling guitars and dry percussion. It’s the first time he’s explicitly positioned himself as a rockstar rather than a rap star. Both Yungblud, Slowthai and even JuiceWRLD have done similar things recently revealing this restlessness in a young generation of artists that find they need to bring guitars back to take the anger to 11.
So, Hobo is back and he’s not holding anything back. You may have thought he’d reached the precipice on previous releases but he’s found a way to punch through. It’s certainly not easy listening but there’s this passion pulsing through it that makes it difficult to turn away. Typical Story is sure to be his most divisive release to date and that’s exactly what makes it so unapologetically thrilling.
