YouTuber Alex Melton Signs With Pure Noise Records

And who says doing covers won’t get you anywhere?

Alex Melton, who’s known for performing pop-punk covers of country songs and vice versa on YouTube, has signed with Pure Noise Records (Devon Kay & The Solutions, Like Pacific, The Seafloor Cinema). The Florence, S.C. musician/producer/YouTuber has over 236,000 subscribers and has accumulated over 22,690,677 views as of this article’s publication. You’ve probably seen some of his videos before, including his bro-country take of Machine Gun Kelly’s “forget me too“, reimagining Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” in the style of Blink-182, and his pop-punk version of Dan + Shay’s “I Should Probably Go To Bed“.

To celebrate his signing, Melton dropped two new covers: a pop-punk take on Tim McGraw’s classic “Something Like That” featuring Ryan Scott Graham of State Champs and Speak Low If You Speak Love and a country version of State Champs’s “Secrets”. Check out the latter below.

Melton started his covers career during a warmup where he put double time drums over Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and falling in love with the idea. Since then he’s released hundreds of videos to YouTube, five of them reaching over a million views. He even got covered by Loudwire and Nerdist due to his interesting covers.

“It’s endlessly fascinating to me to be able to take chords and a melody from a song, and change certain parameters and get a different feeling from the end product,” Melton said in a press release. “I’ll sometimes re-harmonise a chorus, or change the key or tempo or meter, or even sometimes just put a fresh guitar part on the existing structure. It’s fun to distill the song to its truest form and then build it back up in a different way. The context of the lyrics can even shift depending on the accompaniment style.”

His most recent video answers the question of what The Killers classic hit “Mr. Brightside” would sound like with half-time drums. Check that out below.

Jonas Brothers Are Back, Announce First Song In Six Years

We didn’t have to wait for the year 3000 to arrive for a Jonas Brothers reunion.

The once popular sibling trio are back for the first time since 2013. Officially putting their differences aside, the JoBros are getting back together to release new music. Speaking of, the trio will be dropping their first song together since 2013 at midnight called “Sucker”. It will be their first song on their new label Republic Records (bülow, Greta Van Fleet, Post Malone).

During their time apart, the brothers did their own projects. Nick Jonas led a successful solo career, dropping two albums, Kevin Jonas had a TV series Married To Jonas, and Joe Jonas was the frontman of the dance-pop group DNCE, dropping their self-titled album in 2016, featuring their smash hit “Cake By The Ocean”.

The JoBros started their music careers in 2005 and signed to Hollywood Records (Breaking Benjamin, Joywave, Ocean Park Standoff), releasing several albums for the group until their break up in 2013. They’ve toured with artists like Avril Lavigne, Backstreet Boys, and Jesse McCartney. In 2007, the trio played the now defunct Bamboozle Festival in New Jersey, sharing the Macbeth stage with Scary Kids Scaring Kids, Catch 22, and Envy On The Coast.

What’s interesting about this reunion is that Ryan Scott Graham of State Champs and Speak Low If You Speak Love predicted it. In a tweet made back in 2018, he wrote, “When The Jonas Brothers finally do a reunion tour, they will most definitely take out State Champs. I’m speaking it into existence now. Nick and I will be good friends. He seems nice.” When the JoBros reactivated their Instagram account, Graham predicted that they were reuniting officially. He then tweeted, “Nearly a year later, so I’m just gonna bump this one. Hi, @nickjonas!”

Rotting Out Are Back, Release New Song “Reaper”

California’s heaviest hardcore band is back after four years.

Rotting Out surprised fans today by releasing their new song “Reaper”. The nearly two minute track is the band’s first bit of new material since 2015’s Reckoning – EP.

The band will also be playing reunion shows tomorrow in Los Angeles with Xibalba, The Beautiful Ones, Criminal Instinct, Dare, and Built To Believe, and Saturday, January 12 in Berkley, Calif., with Xibalba, The Beautiful Ones, Primal Rite, No Right, and Jawstruck.

A music video for the new track can be found on Pure Noise Records’ (Elder Brother, Like Pacific, Speak Low If You Speak Love) YouTube channel.