Rosebud, the new Current Joys record, is a departure. But then, every Current Joys record is a departure. The solo project of Surf Curse drummer Nick Rattigan, Current Joys has encompassed folksy acoustic music inspired by the Grateful Dead, noisy hyperpop, sexy darkwave, and anything else caught in Rattigan’s dragnet of curiosity. The heartfelt lo-fi indie of his 2015 single “Kids” became a viral anthem in 2020, around the same time Surf Curse’s “Freaks” was doing the same thing on its way to triple-platinum certification; Surf Curse is now recognized as a member of the Spotify Billions Club, with over 1.77B streams. Now, he prepares to release Rosebud, an album of anthemic choruses and maximalist production. Gaze into it deeply and the faint outlines of heartbreak start to emerge. Try to focus on that portrait and it disappears in a cloud of redlined noise.
Initially, Rosebud was a bummer. Rattigan wrote and recorded it while going through a difficult period, and he found himself sitting on half an hour of slowcore songs he could barely stomach. Meanwhile, he was getting his mind blown by the high-concept production of experimental hip-hop artists and cheered himself up working with rappers like Lil Yachty, Polo Perks, Ayooli, and others. It was while doing production and vocals during a session on Matt Proxy’s “God” that Rattigan met Danny Dwyer, the producer who goes by the name never goodbye (“the most beautiful producer in the world,” as Rattigan puts it). Watching Dwyer dial in “God”’s carnivalesque track—which sounds like two or three songs on top of one another, plus seagulls—was a revelation for Rattigan. He sent Dwyer some of the sad-boi songs he’d been sitting on and together they reworked them, adding glitches, screams, foamy curtains of distortion, and whatever else they could think of.
The Rosebud you have in your inbox now is a completely different record from the one Rattigan began with and from anything else in his catalog—which is saying something. It’s punchy. It’s full of big pop hooks shouted through layers of static, sticky Orange County punk chord progressions twisted and chewed up by digital manipulation. “Chaos” is an absolutely blown-out tangle of glitched pop-punk, like streaming Desaparecidos over an old ethernet cable that’s half unplugged. “I don’t think I should be here with you tonight,” Rattigan sings while a single buzzing keyboard melody worms through a brick wall of sound like a termite through solid wood.
At times, Rattigan turns his maximalist ethos on its head, producing exceptionally tender songs made even softer by the unexpected production choices. “The broken part of me has fallen right into your hands / And all I want’s to suffer in your palms,” he sings in “Sufferer,” his heartbreak held at a distance but visible through thick gauze; an obviously synthesized choir only makes the loneliness more pointed, a reminder that the human being at the center of this music is, at the end of the day, by himself. The drifting and autumnal “Halloween” is turned uncanny by stabs of cackling witches and other sound effects that might run the risk of being camp in another context but here make it feel like Rattigan’s pain is being taunted by lowly Walmart ghosts. Even “Skinamarink on the TV,” a song that’s all high static, black metal shrieks, and power-pop keys, has a juicy emotional center that the production only partially obscures; listening to it feels a bit like watching I Saw the TV Glow.
There are moments like this throughout Rosebud, when the vulnerability at the album’s core begins to reshape all of the sound that’s piled on top of it. “Knight of Swords” grinds away on a gabber-influenced beat and at one point is completely blotted out by noise. Behind it, though, Rattigan calmly plucks out a supremely bummed arpeggio on his guitar. No matter how loud the song gets, that guitar line seems to hang in space, a weird bit of human persistence and resilience in the face of overwhelming dissonance.
Rattigan’s always allowed his interests and curiosity to guide how he makes his music—his falling in love with Lil Peep’s music greatly influenced Love + Pop—but Rosebud feels like an encapsulation of everything he’s done in his career, even as it sounds very little like any of his previous records. Nu metal, screamo, electronica, hip-hop, power-pop, emo, darkwave—it’s a rush of signifiers. “I wanted it to be a collage of all of my influences,” Rattigan says, and while that might make it seem valedictory, the kind of great summing-up you do when you’ve run out of things to say, it’s obvious that bringing together so many different ideas has brought Rattigan to a new level of inspiration. In that way, it’s appropriate that Rosebud is the first record Rattigan is self-releasing after many years on Secretly Canadian. It’s a throwback to his early days of uploading The Nicholas Project and TELE/VISIONS tracks to Bandcamp, and a tribute to the profound artistic freedom Rosebud represents.
You can hear Current Joys’ “Televisions” and “Kids” in the 2026 film Obsession, while Surf Curses’ music has appeared in video games like Rock Band 4, NHL 22, NHL 23, and Everywhere. Rattigan has also collaborated with Lil Yachty (“Gatsby”), Polo Perks, AyooLii, and FearDorian (“A Dogs Chance”), Fantasy of a Broken Heart (“Road Song”), and Matt Proxy (“God”).
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