Benson Boone is a nice young man who became world famous writing the sort of gutting, howling ballad you might encounter in AI-prompted shorts starring weeping puppies and shipwrecked babies or on line at the bank. “Beautiful Things,” the lead single off the 22-year-old West Coast singer-songwriter’s 2024 debut album, Fireworks & Rollerblades, rode a pleading vocal and chugging guitar riff to massive renown, topping charts from Romania to Ireland to Portugal. “Oh God,” the song adjures, “don’t take these beautiful things that I’ve got!” It’s a frosty record about being in love, its sweetness coming into conflict with the biblical notion of a jealous God seeking the lion’s share of human admiration. An unusual thought — what if you loved someone so much that your maker took umbrage? — yielded the most inescapable single of 2024. Shockingly, but also fittingly, it came from an ex-Mormon American Idol dropout who signed to Imagine Dragons yowler Dan Reynolds’s Night Street imprint. These are not typical ingredients for a cross-cultural radio smash.
The list of 21st-century chart sensations who grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is compact but very pertinent to Boone’s ambitions: The retro-fabulist zest of the Killers’ Brandon Flowers, the operatic loquaciousness of Panic! At the Disco’s Brendon Urie, and the off-puttingly pure earnestness of Reynolds are blueprints. Boone’s sophomore effort, American Heart, out today, also looks further afield to ’70s glam, ’80s synth-rock, and 2010s pop on a hero’s quest to seed a contemporary style that facilitates the backflipping and vocal skydiving his gigs now center. Increasingly seething backlash against Boone seems to doubt there’s more to the TV and internet star turned Grammy nominee than these high-flying antics. Boone is aware: “If you hate me or my music, at least have a good reason for it,” he insisted in an April TikTok clip. But the musical and kinesiological grandstanding that pisses people off ticked up rather than down in recent weeks. Boone managed to sneak a backflip into an interview with Jimmy Fallon. On Saturday Night Live, he doubled down on the dandy gymnastics that incensed Grammy viewers who learned how enthusiastically he delivers “Beautiful Things” onstage. But Heart veers away from the Christian-college coffeehouse vibes and the stomping, whooping ballads of the debut album and the big hit. Painting broadly on a still relatively fresh canvas, Boone expresses an endearing willingness to grow his craft but also a steely reverence to painfully obvious points of reference.
Boone’s predecessors and influences — pop-vocal Grammy nominees like Harry Styles, Sam Smith, and Shawn Mendes — are never hard to spot. The screechy hook with the gently placed “damn” in “Reminds Me of You” approximates Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran’s boyish tones shattering in desperation. The high notes introducing the chorus of “Momma Song” cut the way Adele’s voice sharpens and ascends in the process of dropping a thermonuclear hook. The peppy synth-punk love song “I Wanna Be the One You Call” is a tour de force of mixing and matching familiar signatures: the airport-reggae scatting of aughts fedora-bro folk folds into the jittery melisma of the Strokes and Neon Trees before going full Queen + Adam Lambert in a shouting coda. Most pop stars don’t rifle through all those ideas in a single song. And few would dare to schedule the three songs — the lilting blue-eyed soul of “Reminds,” the reverent piano balladry of “Momma,” and the post-punk revival-revival moment of “Call” — in a row, or on the same album. (Miley might.) Like an episode of Idol, every damn thing here reminds you of someone who made a splash beforehand. And it’s in that twisting sound and center of gravity that Boone aims to make his mark.
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But Boone’s musical and visual allusions to the songs and stage demeanor of Neon Trees’ Tyler Glenn, Mendes, Smith, and Styles, and older inspirations like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, and Elton John never gets as combative, as up against sociopolitical odds, as the assumed or implicit queerness in their music and fashion. His art is currently most arresting as a feat of athleticism; there’s little consternation in its vision of Americana, though the flag-draped cover art and synth-y heartland rock bits seek unsubtle Springsteen-ness. The big source of drama in Heart is the presumption of the prayer in “Things” going unanswered; it focuses on a bad breakup and sparingly carnal scenes from the rebound. The wailing “Man in Me” and the winking “Wanted Man” derive a sense of masculine fulfillment from being loved and lusted after. “Mr Electric Blue” toasts to a “good, hardworking American” who’ll “make you bite the dirt” in a scrap. The latter track, which a Rolling Stone interview says is about Boone’s father, carries hints of The Man Who Sold the World and Ziggy Stardust and Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” in its awe for an inspiring otherworldly figure. While the elders framed their characters as messianic figures saving humanity from calamity, “Blue” only wants you to know this alien fucks and fights. (The video leans into Boone’s Chad side to get a rise out of haters but accidentally accentuates how often his obligatory flashy ’70s threads scream Evel Knievel when they’re going for “Rocket Man.”) The most unique points in the singer’s story — what is it like to get swept up in the whirlwind of notoriety and the Los Angeles music industry while you’re building a new worldview and persona — are likewise sidelined. Whenever Boone wants to get more probing than the “What if a Pat Benatar song were also an Imagine Dragons song?” query that “Wanted Man” answers, he’ll be a formidable force in pop.
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