She mentioned that she was gearing up to work on a new album and was curious to hear more of what Mod Sun was working on, so he sent her album track “Flames” to which she replied with a voicenote. That same week, Mod Sun had released “Karma,” the lead single off Internet Killed the Rockstar, and Lavigne was blown away. “So the first thing I do is DM her like, ‘Hi icon,” and she was like, ‘Oh my God, that s-t was the craziest thing I've seen on the Internet in the last 10 years. Not long after, Avril Lavigne ended up seeing what happened online and decided to follow Mod Sun. Except his ring managed to create a spiderweb crack, which led to Kelly kicking the whole thing in as he documented the stunt on Instagram Live. Last September, after a night out in Hollywood celebrating the release of Machine Gun Kelly’s Tickets To My Downfall, Mod Sun was driving the two back home when Kelly stuck his head out the window and - seemingly innocently - hit the front windshield. “It was the truest moment of like, me and Kels are forever going to be kids - and even his daughter is acting like our fucking parents at this point.” So I pull up, we get in the studio and ‘Bloody Valentine’ just comes out like vomit.” He believes the song took about two hours to churn out, and by 2 AM, he and MGK had been screaming at the top of their lungs for a little too long because eventually, his daughter (who is now 11 years old) walked into the studio to see what was going on. "It was right after Christmas and he's like, ‘Yo, you want to come over and write a song with me?’ And we hadn’t really done that together. “I'm sitting in bed and it was 11:11 PM, and this dude hits me up and I did not want to get out of bed," he says. He says of all he contributed to this project, though, he’ll never forget the experience of working on the song. More recently, Mod Sun creative-directed Machine Gun Kelly’s Tickets To My Downfall, which topped the Billboard 200 co-wrote the hit “Bloody Valentine” and also co-wrote and co-directed the album’s accompanying film Downfalls High. Spent every second together from there on out." Mod Sun ended up directing the one-take music video for his song “Sail” with an almost non-existent budget - it now has nearly 140 million YouTube views. “He wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of people, he wasn't making friends, but me and him? Best friends, right there. Mod Sun first met Machine Gun Kelly while on Warped Tour in 2012. That is a rock star to me.”īelow, Mod Sun explains how his latest high-profile co-writes came to be, from a rock and alternative radio hit for MGK to an Internet Killed the Rockstar standout featuring Lavigne. Bob Dylan is still making music at this moment right now and he's in his 80s. I changed up my lifestyle and I want to live a long time. "I don't do drugs or drink alcohol anymore, I'm running three miles a day, eating healthy… I made it past 27.
“There's been this idea of the rebirth of what a rock star is nowadays," he continues.
“I wanted to tell the other side of the story, which is that if there's a killing, there's a rebirth,” he says, explaining that the re-recorded and new tracks use major chords to invoke a sunnier, more positive outlook than the minor chords heard throughout the original album. To keep that energy going, on Friday (May 7), the deluxe version of Internet Killed the Rockstar arrives with eight additional tracks, five of which have never been heard before. And now it's like me and my best friends taking over the damn world.” It’s crazy because I grew up in what I call the scene, and then it died. “I've been able to sustain all the time because I have all of these people who are great artists that support me and without them, I don't know if the world would have ever taken me seriously. “I just signed a record deal, but prior to that I was competing with every major label artist as an independent and, that being said, I also didn't have a team around me telling me good or bad,” says Mod Sun.
Meanwhile, he formed a friendship with the pop-punk princess herself, Avril Lavigne, who later became the only featured artist on Mod Sun’s February release, Internet Killed the Rockstar, his fourth album and first on Big Noise. He counts chart-topping artists like Machine Gun Kelly and blackbear as lifelong best friends, and recently collaborated on hits with both.
It’s a sentiment Mod Sun - who entered the industry as a rapper, releasing his first EP in 2010 and debut full-length in 2015 - has only recently realized the full power of.