Jeff Rosenstock makes increasingly chaotic albums for an increasingly chaotic world. With eachpassing year, it feels like the temperature of the universe boils five degrees hotter, and with eachnew album, Rosenstock’s music grows more unwieldy andlawless. Louder, faster, more feral.Which brings us to 2023—a planet on fire, a mere 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsdayclock, and the release of Rosenstock’s appropriately titled, anarchic record,HELLMODE.“To me, the album feels like the chaos of being alive right now,” Rosenstock saysofHELLMODE. “We’re experiencing all these things at the same time that trigger our senses,and emotions that make us feel terrible. We’re just feeling way too much all at once!” But for allits textured turmoil, there are also surprising glimpses of clarity and grace to be foundinHELLMODE, when Rosenstock deliberately slows things down in places that are prettier andmore delicate, rare moments of shelter in the storm. Which only makes it more rewarding whenthese moments unexpectedly unravel and spiral back into extreme, manic chaos, like abruptlybeing flung into a Nintendo game on level 99.HELLMODEmarks the fifth studio album the prolific Rosenstock has released in the last tenyears under his own name, following the dissolution of his beloved cult projects Bomb the MusicIndustry! and The Arrogant Sons of Bitches. Also tucked into his rapidly expanding catalog is alive record, a ska reimagining of his 2020 albumNO DREAM, and various dumps of stray songsand loose singles. And somewhere on the side, he has found time to score the Emmy-nominatedanimated seriesCraig of the Creek.Rosenstock’s rising profile and critical acclaim over the last decade have been something of ananomaly. He’s a proud torchbearer of the punk sonics, aesthetics, and ethos of his youth, leaninginto pop punk and ska sensibilities that were deemed DecidedlyUncool by the gatekeepers ofthe time. (On any given day at a big outdoor music festival, he is likely the only musician whowill bust out a saxophone solo.) But when Rosenstock celebrates these styles, he somehow endsup getting praise from tastemakers and landing on prominent year-end lists. Maybe it’s becausehis appreciation doesn’t feel like cheap nostalgia or surface-level cosplay. Everything he does isjust so damned sincere.That success is something Rosenstock has been conflicted about, and fuels some of the anxietythat runs throughHELLMODE. “It’s weird feeling success at the worst possible time, while theworld falls apart,” he says. “These things I’ve been unintentionally working towards for the lasttwo decades have come to fruition now, when everything is on fire.”To recordHELLMODEin the summer of 2022, Rosenstock once again enlisted his longtimestudio collaborator, Jack Shirley, the Grammy-nominated master of heaviness who has recordedall of Rosenstock’s studio albums. But this time, they took a slightly more ambitious approach,booking time at the legendary EastWest Studios in Hollywood. They recorded to tape in Studio2, the same hallowed ground where System of a Down recordedToxicity, and where WhitneyHouston laid down vocal tracks forThe Bodyguardsoundtrack. The newfound studio resourcesproduced the biggest and most expansive Jeff Rosenstock record to date.