Spat out of the realms of TikTok and Instagram reels, TX2 is a mildly talented artist who seems to want to make his poorly masked self-loathing of being the same height as a hobbit your problem. A career built on some of the worst MacBook metalcore (stretching the word metalcore to its very limits) you’ve ever heard, crowd plants for ‘viral’ tiktok videos and lyrics designed to make 30-second clips drag on like the uncut version of Das Boot, he’s somehow amassed a following, but then again, so did Jim Jones and look how that turned out.
Dressed like someone the Daily Mail threw into one of those temporary goth shops to promote their anti-emo pieces in the 2000s, TX2 (or Timothy to his friends) is a horrendous indictment of how normal people view alternative music. It’s music to refuse to tidy your bedroom to, or something you play when you think someone at school is bullying you because they bumped into you once in a crowded hallway. It reeks of hairspray and cheap nail polish, but in a way that makes a mockery of itself. His previous efforts leave bloody, torn fingernails at the depths of the barrel with their warped takes on self-harm, sex (in a very off-putting, braggadocio manner) and being an outcast. Sonically, he veers between latter-day Bring Me The Horizon tracks that didn’t even make the drawing board, Simple Plan and an Asking Alexandria cover band, gaslighting listeners with distortion as a guise for heaviness and snark as a guise for having a personality. It’s only two steps removed from that insane genre of Instagram music where badly tattooed weirdos whisper-scream into a microphone in their parents’ box room. There appears to be so little actual substance to the man, but his lack of personality and off-putting presence hints at a thrift store suit and a slot in right-wing media, denouncing his music and seeking Jesus in less than a decade.
“There's better poetry and insight into the human spirit in the piss-flecked scribblings of a bookmaker's toilet.”
On his full debut, titled End Of Us, things don’t improve. Opening with an indistinct slab of soullessness, his grating voice soon makes an appearance, and not for the first time, the song is only listenable when the guest vocalist (this time Deathbyromy) pops up. Lyrically, it’s as vapid and pointless as his previous works. There’s better poetry and insight into the human spirit in the piss-flecked scribblings of a bookmaker’s toilet. It’s actually quite worrying that kids and the emotionally stunted actually like this material purely because there is nothing resembling a redeeming feature on this entire record.
There are parts on here that sound like a broken AI bot trying to recreate My Chemical Romance but failing miserably, and it genuinely would not be a surprise if the entire musical backdrop of this album was from prompts. Without a shred of hyperbole, there’s more soul in a Republican party conference than anything you will hear on these tracks. His insincerity and plastic facade may fool impressionable kids, but in reality he’s just a Gen Z brokeNCYDE with somehow less talent.
‘The Rain’ is a pathetic slab of algorithm bait, as paint-by-numbers as an alternative music track can be, trying in vain to ape bands like Motionless In White but not even living up to that low bar. For some reason the record ends with a five-and-a-half-minute slab of pathetic, saccharine rubbish featuring one of the 2010s’ most regrettable musical phases in Black Veil Brides. Is it trying to be deep? Is it trying to be sexy? Who the hell knows, but it manages neither and ties the album together in a bow made of sewer-soaked shoelaces.
On the whole, this is a sonic experience only marginally better than crippling tinnitus; if you’ve made it through the entire album, then your sadist tendencies would impress Marquis de Sade.
Shite.
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