Falling In Reverse has earned its first-ever rock radio chart-topper with its current single, “Popular Monster.” The standalone track was issued last November and has steadily climbed the Active Rock survey, with 43 million streams of the song and 19 million views for the video adding to its success.
Singer Ronnie Radke told us that the song is much more complex and harder to create than people might think: “People say 'rap rock this, rap rock that,' but they don't understand. This is not the same. This is like taking straight West Coast hip-hop beats and mixing them with like, rock and real drums, and that is really hard to do. Like, to make it sound good in the mix of it? That alone, it was hard.”
Radke recently told Forbes that he preferred issuing “Popular Monster” as a standalone non-album single, explaining, “I saw rappers doing it and people like Drake doing it. I feel like they did it with more an ease and carelessness, like they just wanted to release their art and their music.” Radke added, “For the near future it’s going to be singles and videos every three or four months.”
The success of “Popular Monster” is bittersweet following the death last month of the band's guitarist, Derek Jones, at the age of 35. A cause of death is pending. Jones' fiancée, Christina Cetta, passed away after a battle with cancer last November.