By Briana Hernandez – Staff Reporter

AJR is an American pop band composed of multi-instrumentalist brothers Adam, Jack, and Ryan Met. The band is a pop group who write, produce, and mix their material in the living room of their apartment. Their most successful songs are “I’m Ready,” “Weak,” “100 Bad Days,” and “Burn the House Down.” In 2019, their third album “Neotheater” debuted at #8 on the Billboard 200, and hit #1 on the Top Rock Albums chart.

The name “AJR” comes from the first initials of the three brothers, Adam, Jack, and Ryan. Their musical style has been described as “electric,” combining elements of pop, doo-wop, electronic, and dubstep.

This group would originally perform covers of songs until they started to make themselves more known through singing at Washington Square Park and Central Park with their own original songs.

The brothers released their third EP, titled “What Everyone’s Thinking,” on September 16, 2016, which features the lead single “Weak.” The lead single was written by the band in a day, within a few hours, without any idea of the future success the single would have. “Weak” has been certified Platinum in the U.S., Canada, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, and Gold in Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Australia. It has over 320 million streams on Spotify.

The band released its second studio album, The Click, on June 9, 2017, featuring the singles “Weak”, “Drama” and “Sober Up”, which features frontman Rivers Cuomo from Weezer, who co-wrote the track. This song reached number one on the Mediabase Alternative Singles chart in 2018. The band’s 2018 tour in support of the album, The Click Tour, featured Hundred Handed, Grizfolk, Ocean Park Standoff, and MAX as openers.

An extended version of The Click was released on September 21, 2018. The Click (Deluxe) included new tracks such as “Role Models”, “Normal” and “Burn The House Down”, the latter which the band released in March, 2018 as a single and reached number two on the Mediabase Alternative Singles chart. Also included was “Pretender – Acoustic”, an acoustic version of “Pretender”, which was a collaboration between AJR, EDM artist Steve Aoki and American rapper Lil Yachty.

In all of their songs the lyrics are easily known and are stuck within the beat of the songs. Their songs are easily relatable to a degree for their targeted audience. Even those who don’t listen to pop, electronic, doo-wop or anything like that, they can still can get glued to at least one of their songs. This being due to how they suck listeners in.

They don’t target everyone instead they only make songs specified group. For those who like rap, heavy metal, or etc. those are the types of people who would not like this type of music. 

In the beginning of this song there is a short clip of “I’m Ready” from Spongebob Squarepants. This song has an upbeat and is very positive in its tune. This song talks about being crazy about a girl and how they’re going to “set the night on fire”. With this song they put a twist on the meaning of the blues, with an upbeat tune, but talking about a girl. They are similar to most boy bands out there, including One Direction, the Jonas Brothers, and the Backstreet Boys.

This song brings the relatable state that not everyone wants to get up everyday. Also, brings how even though one person may be weak it doesn’t mean anything, there shouldn’t be discrimination against it. Part of their lyrics that play into this is, “But I’m weak, and what’s wrong with that”. Everyone is weak at one point, it doesn’t mean that someone should be attacked for being so. 

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars