Somewhere, a 2009 iPod Nano just felt a disturbance. Rock Sound has resurrected the punk goes pop compilation, and they’re not being subtle about the lineage. Rock Sound Presents: Pop Sound, Vol.1 dropped July 2 as a CD bundled exclusively with a special 48-page summer edition of the magazine, and the concept is exactly what your Warped Tour memories are telling you it is: ten rock and alternative artists covering the biggest pop songs of the moment.
The tracklist is a genuinely inspired set of pairings. Enter Shikari take on Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?,” which on paper sounds like a dare and in practice is the kind of reinvention Rou Reynolds was built for. Bowling For Soup, the band that made covering pop divas a rite of passage two decades ago, gets Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” casting that keeps the tradition’s sense of humor intact. VUKOVI cover “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters, confirming that the animated girl group has fully crossed from Netflix phenomenon into scene canon. Winona Fighter tackle Charli XCX’s “Sympathy Is A Knife,” Scene Queen gets Kesha’s “Your Love Is My Drug” in what might be the most obvious perfect match on the record, and DeathByRomy drags Rihanna’s “Disturbia” back to the darkness it always belonged to. South Arcade covering “SexyBack,” Huddy on Ariana Grande’s “we can’t be friends,” Sophie Powers doing Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need,” and former BTOB member ILHOON closing things with a Justin Bieber cover round out the ten.
For anyone under 25 (myself included), some history. Fearless Records’ Punk Goes series ran from 2000 to 2019 and produced 19 compilations, with Punk Goes Pop as its crown jewel. Those CDs were a gateway drug: kids came for the A Day To Remember cover of a song they knew from the radio and left with a new favorite band. Some covers outgrew their originals entirely in scene spaces. When the series went dormant, TikTok inherited the format in fragments, thirty-second shred covers and pop-punk remixes, but nobody was curating it as a proper album. Rock Sound just claimed that vacancy.
The delivery method is the other half of the story. There’s no streaming release. If you want Pop Sound, Vol.1, you buy the physical CD with the magazine, tote bag optional. In an era when print music media keeps shrinking, Rock Sound has been surviving on exactly this model, collectible physical bundles that turn readers into buyers, and attaching an exclusive album to an issue is the boldest version of it yet. They even threw a launch party at Popworld in London with Bears In Trees, VUKOVI, Cody Frost, and others on hand. As someone well involved with independent music publications, I’ll say the quiet part: this is the most creative thing a music magazine has done with physical media in years, and the rest of us are taking notes.
The Vol.1 in the title is doing a lot of confident work. If this sells the way the nostalgia suggests it will, the scene’s most beloved format is officially back, one exclusive CD at a time. Now taking bets on who covers “Espresso” for Vol.2.
Keep up with Rock Sound: Instagram // X // Facebook // YouTube // TikTok // Website
