On paper, ‘King Kong’ sounds like a good time. Sunny vocals, a hypnotic pulse, a biting chorus that builds to Tyson Ritter taunting “you’d better bite down hard” — it carries the kind of happy, bouncing energy that The All-American Rejects have always done well. But spend a little longer with it and the mood underneath starts to show. The lyrics are genuinely dark — about being let down, about feeling like a zombie going through the motions — and that contrast between the bright surface and the bruised interior is where the song is most interesting.
Sandbox, due 15th May, marks their first album in fourteen years and their first as an independent release, a fact that adds a certain weight to a song about refusing to perform for an industry that never quite fit. If ‘King Kong’ is any indication, this is a band making music entirely on their own terms, and that freedom is audible even when the result doesn’t fully ignite.
Ritter has spoken about the track being rooted in his experience of Los Angeles — the performing monkey quality of chasing an industry that was never really built for him, the relief of leaving it behind and going home to Oklahoma. That tension comes through in the music whether you know the backstory or not. There’s something in the delivery that feels like someone who figured out the game too late, and decided to write a song about it instead of playing along.
The lyric video leans into the absurdity of all that with a cheap gorilla suit living its best life on a beach — odd, lo-fi, and very much on brand. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.
The problem is that ‘King Kong’ is good without being great. The ideas are there, the energy is there, and the self-awareness is sharper than you might expect from a band returning after fourteen years away. But it doesn’t quite land the knockout blow it’s building toward. For a song about being let down, it’s a little ironic that it leaves you wanting just a bit more.
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