The Northeast Louisiana vampire rocker follows his Skull Boy album with a single about suffocation, fear and a hook that hits like a freight train.
Some choruses introduce themselves politely. The one in Jackson Culp’s new single, “You Own Me,” walks in and clears the table. “You own me, I can barely breathe,” he sings, and the song spends the rest of its running time proving he means it.
Culp, the singer-songwriter, guitarist and founder of Jackson Culp and The Company, released the track Oct. 23 along with an official lyric video, which launched on YouTube the same day:
It’s the first new music since his January album What Happened to the Skull Boy?, and it arrives sounding like a man who had to get something out before he could move on to anything else. He says the chorus grabbed him the moment it showed up, and he knew it had to be the next thing out the door.
“The chorus of this song arrests you and derails you,” Culp says. “It’s a seismic chorus that blasts away everything in its path.”
The song began at the end of January, with Culp on the couch with an acoustic guitar, noodling and waiting for something to land. He had been hunting down old records at thrift stores and playing them at home, listening for forgotten sounds worth borrowing. Somewhere in that routine, the story of his next album started to take shape. He took the first verse and chorus straight into his recording program, then wrote the second verse and the closing guitar solo from there. “This song was very much written acoustically and through production,” he says, and you can hear it. The acoustic guitar drifts in and out of the arrangement like a thought that won’t stay buried, while keys, drums and bass lock into a driving groove underneath. Synths show up sparingly, and nothing sounds like it’s there to fill space.
The solo is the other big moment. Culp describes it as psychedelic and sharp as a knife’s edge, and it cuts through the mix in what he calls “the most vampire rock manner possible.” The first chorus lands like a freight train, in his words, and the song circles back to it before the guitar takes over for the finish. The single was mastered by Kris Crummett, who has spent his career in emo, pop-punk and alternative rock with bands like Sleeping With Sirens, Dance Gavin Dance, Sum 41 and Alesana. It’s an interesting pairing for a swampy, theatrical rock project, and it gives the song a sharp finish without sanding off the grime.
What the song is about isn’t hard to hear, but Culp spells it out anyway. “The song is about being trapped and controlled by something that you wish you could escape,” he says. The core emotion, he adds, is “desperation and suffocation.” The something in question is the character he has been building across his records, the decaying figure at the center of the Skull Boy story that ends the album rejuvenated by a deal he doesn’t fully understand and unsure of what he has set in motion. “You Own Me” picks up in that uncertainty and mixes it with real despair, so the fiction and the feeling feed each other.
A line near the end stuck with Culp too. “I’ve been afraid of everything,” he sings, and he considers that fresh ground for the genre he named himself. “This is untapped territory within the
vampire rock genre,” he says. Vampire rock so far has been about desire and dreams, and fear hasn’t had much of a seat at the table. He says he plans to keep chasing that lead on future releases and look at the vampire idea through a different lens.
For anyone new to Culp, vampire rock can sound like a gag until you hear the music, and then it starts to feel like a place. Since 2021 he has built a three-part story out of three records. The Lagoon introduced two people trapped in something they couldn’t name. Everyone’s Favorite Vampire followed in 2023 and showed a charming figure whose darker nature slowly came into view. What Happened to the Skull Boy? closed the arc this year. He writes, records and produces all of it at his studio in Northeast Louisiana, building the songs in Ableton before running them through a found TEAC A-2300S reel-to-reel for mastering. Nobody bolted the label on afterward. The sound, the stories, the characters and the visuals grew up together.
He references his work to “a murder-mystery found itself trapped inside a psychedelic whirlpool,” and the rest of the answer is just as unruly. It’s the kind of response that makes you want to hear the record. And people are starting to. Culp’s music has racked up more than 571,000 all-time YouTube views, along with 137,043 TikTok likes and 157,238 Spotify streams, and the band’s Instagram videos pulled in 284,787 views in the last 90 days alone.
The press has caught on as well. The News-Star called the band “riveting music and electric entertainment,” and Louisiana Life Magazine described vampire rock as sultry soul and stabbing guitar riffs with a beat made for dark alleyways. The Belmont Star set the band next to Nick Cave, Queens of the Stone Age, the Misfits, Arctic Monkeys and Tame Impala before concluding that Culp’s world has “its own logic and its own emotional temperature.” Breakline Press put it simply: “For Jackson Culp, music isn’t just something you hear. It’s something you step into.”
Live, the project which hits harder on the rock side, becomes a three-piece band. Culp fronts it on vocals and guitar, with bassist Rex Bolls and drummer Matthew Martinez rounding out the lineup, and Culp says the new song is built to travel. There’s less synth on this recording than on the album, which means the current trio can play it faithfully. The band has shared bills with nationally known acts, including Grammy-nominated Bowling for Soup at Green Street Monster Fest, where organizers described the music as a place “where eerie beauty and emotional truth collide.”
What does Culp want people to remember? Three words: “Mysterious, shocking, and cool.” And when he’s asked what separates the band from its peers, he gets a laugh with a straightforward answer. “This band does not use auto-tune and it still works.” The longer answer comes when he talks about where he wants to go. “We believe the groove is immortal and too much of a good thing is a bad thing,” he says. “We want to keep the audience and listener surprised.” And on the past: “We don’t want to be a prisoner to the past, even though we are influenced by it.”
He has a clear idea of how he wants the single to land. “I want someone who has never heard our band before to listen to this song and be rattled,” he says. “I want this song to represent deep emotions that one might’ve forgotten they ever had.”
“You Own Me” is streaming everywhere now, and the band is already on the move, with two community events on the fall calendar.
On Thursday, Oct. 29, Jackson Culp and The Company play Downtown Monroe Main Street’s Fright Night 5K at Flying Tiger Brewery, with proceeds supporting the Downtown Monroe Main Street Volunteer Board, which hosts and supports events that bring the downtown community together (more info). On Saturday, Nov. 21, the band plays from noon to 3 p.m. at Warhawk Harley-Davidson’s sixth annual Toy Run, where riders are asked to bring a $10 registration fee or one unwrapped toy to help local children and families in need (more info).
In between, the band heads to Texas for the TX Tea Room in Dallas on Sunday, Nov. 8 (tickets), and Boomerz in Austin on Saturday, Nov. 14.
Follow Jackson Culp and The Company on Instagram and their website.