Falling In Reverse released the single “Popular Monster” on November 20, 2019, through Epitaph Records. Arriving as a standalone release, it put rapped verses, a sung chorus and heavy breakdowns into the same song. Its video made the title literal, with frontman Ronnie Radke transforming into a werewolf.
The song’s tension starts with a narrator trying to understand his distress while being told he’s going through a phase. Depression, anger and the pressure of other people’s judgments feed into the chorus. In the release statement reported by Loudwire, Radke described a hero who becomes the monster society insists he is. “It shows what happens when you get pushed too far,” he said. The video takes that conflict into a courtroom, then pushes it into a violent transformation. Hysteria Magazine’s contemporary review also noted the courtroom imagery’s connection to the band’s 2011 “The Drug in Me Is You” video, giving longtime viewers a recognizable setting inside the new story.
Radke wrote “Popular Monster” with Tyler Smyth and Cody Quistad, and produced it with Smyth. Smyth also handled engineering and mastering. The arrangement gives Radke several different ways to express the character’s unraveling: rapid delivery in the verses, melody in the chorus and screams in the heavier passages. The hook had taken substantial revision to reach its finished form.
In a July 2023 interview with 100.3 The X Rocks, Radke said he’d written the chorus six times. “I don’t have to be sold on the first chorus that I write,” he recalled realizing. His test was whether he could return to a song the following morning without immediately questioning it. That willingness to keep revising was part of a larger change in how Falling In Reverse released music.
Radke explained that disappointment with the performance of 2017’s Coming Home had prompted him to reconsider the album cycle. Taking cues from rap and pop releases, he concentrated his effort on individual songs and their videos. “Losing My Mind,” “Losing My Life” and “Drugs” preceded “Popular Monster.” In his account, the latter’s success persuaded him to continue that approach.
The breakthrough reached rock radio in 2020. “Popular Monster” became Falling In Reverse’s first No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Songs chart that May, as ABC Audio reported at the time. It had achieved that result as a standalone single, with no new studio album accompanying its climb. In 2021, it also became the band’s first platinum-certified single in the United States.
The song eventually found an album home on Popular Monster, released August 16, 2024. Falling In Reverse’s fifth studio album gathered it alongside later singles including “Voices in My Head,” “Zombified” and “Watch the World Burn.” The 11-track release was their first full-length since Coming Home, bringing the standalone 2019 song into the album catalog as its title track.
