If cutting-edge pop music in America is a melting pot of styles, genres, and influences, then the Nashville-based alt-rock artist Bryce Fox has one hand firmly on the stirring stick. The singer, who was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, before moving west to cut his teeth in Los Angeles, explored myriad musical avenues in the first decade of his career and has now fused his diverse tastes and talents with his chameleon-like songwriting abilities to develop a truly wide-reaching yet singular sound. With his forthcoming album The Butterfly and the Bomb, Fox has moved beyond the sensual songcraft he made his name on to explore an expansive and mature series of songs concerned with his fresh yet fragile family trying to survive in a chaotic, dangerous world. By harnessing this mix of inspirations and diverse sonic pathways while embracing the regional touchstones and personal details of his own melting-pot All-American story, Bryce Fox has arrived in a major way.  

Having grown up in a musically diverse home in a college town with a distinct but tempered culture, Fox learned to play music as a jazz band saxophonist in school but was always experimenting with self-recording, making beats and random tracks, and tinkering with various instruments. After a startling cancer diagnosis in college, he headed to California, fueled by what he calls a “self-reckoning” after his brush with mortality. The new lease on life gave him the courage to follow his true passion of making songs. In LA, Fox leaned into a sultry sound, something that came naturally to him but that he views now almost as a character formed in the recording booth—fittingly, the place he feels perhaps most comfortable. “I do feel like a recording artist more than anything else,” he says. “To me, the writing comes second; the recording is the main creative part in making the music, because that’s where all the trial-and-error comes in and the personality comes out of my voice.” 

As he began to rack up fans, streams, views, clicks, and the like, a funny thing happened to Fox: he fell in love. The idea of settling down seemed like an idea not only good for his personal life but for his work, so he and his wife moved to Nashville, where he began working on new songs with a more existential, purposeful slant. In the process, he began to feel his sonic muse changing as well; leaning into his deep love for alt-rock and hip-hop, Fox started creating pieces of an album that defy any one genre and appeal to fans across the entire spectrum of pop music. All the while, his own singular personality remains at the front and center of each track. 

Collaborating with various writers and esteemed producer David Pramik (Machine Gun Kelly, X Ambassadors, Selena Gomez), with whom Fox had worked in the past, an album began to take shape. As Fox prepared for the arrival of his son in 2023, a new, domestic life began to color his lyrics, resulting in a sort of metamorphosis of hope amidst adversity and beauty in the face of humanity’s destructive tendencies. Thus, the album’s title: the “Butterfly,” a song Fox wrote for and uses to refer to his child, is being protected from the “Bomb,” which essentially functions as anything that would threaten the destruction of what Fox loves and holds dear.  

“This album is a great combination of feelings and experiences that I’ve had entering this new phase of my life. Overall the songs are filled with anger, passion, and appreciation. The new topics were daunting to write and share, but I couldn’t be happier with the message and the urgency I think it conveys,” reflects Fox. 

The album’s first single, “Riot,” is Fox’s second collaboration with Nashville alt-artist Sam Tinnesz, and serves as an anthemic marching order about rage and rebellion directed toward the gatekeepers of free speech and thought. The song explodes from the speaker with a hip-hop sample and deep groove of a bassline while Fox’s smooth verses give way to a screamed chorus.  

“Sam and I knew we wanted to collab again, and this time for my album. Our last song, ‘Loser,’ was a vulnerable, self-deprecating misfit anthem. In order to restore some street cred and off-kilter violence, we wanted to write a song showing that these ‘losers’ also have a little rage in ‘em. So we wrote a song of rebellion,” exclaims Fox.  

“World’s on Fire” is a midtempo, alt-rock political song about divisiveness and wasted focus that highlights Fox’s effortless croon; even so, his words have weight. “Some may say this is pretty self-explanatory, however, this song is not specifically about climate change. It is specifically about the political divisiveness that we’ve been suckered into and fooled by. It’s far more threatening to us and our existence than just climate change alone. I’m hoping the message of this song helps people realize in order to fight an outside threat, we can’t waste our energy fighting with each other.” 

The pummeling “The King is Dead” is a high-powered anthem birthed out of the fear of living in the Information Age. Fox adds, “Technology is making it harder to keep the unaware, unaware. Skeletons are being found out and corruption is being exposed. This song is essentially about technology being the new world order and taking over the human race.”

Fox explores the theory of people being the product of their own environment on “Monster,” screaming out “No laws, simple man grown to a monster.” “The song title plays off the saying ‘you’ve created a monster.’  People’s environments are being destroyed by phonies wielding a power that they are starting to find out they can’t control,” he exclaims.

“On God” starts off with a slow build before catapulting listeners into a rapid-fire delivery. Fox describes the track as,  “the last hail mary we threw at the album. There are a few different metaphors for the title. The first being ‘On God’ or ‘I Swear,’ like I swear this to be true, and the second being ‘this truth is of God’s plan.’ The chaos of the song represents the unravelling of society and its fight or flight effect it has on the human psyche.” 

On “Psychopath,” Fox packs a punch with the high-energy track. “This song is more of an energy song than a deep introspective song. Me and my collaborators were essentially celebrating finishing the album and wanted to throw up one last prayer of a song to see if it stuck. Our overly productive album work week had us feeling loopy, drunk and perhaps a little high and psychotic, à la Psychopath,” states Fox. 

Throughout The Butterfly and the Bomb, Bryce Fox delivers themes of defiance, hope, and joy despite the turbulent, destructive times. Powered by his own newfound reason to exist, he has fully embraced the artist’s natural inclination to evolve and to grow, resulting in his most personal, challenging, and accomplished work to date.  

“Being married and having a kid really shaped this new music and gave it such a different tone,” Fox says. “I’m a concerned father now and I’m definitely thinking about the world differently now that my son is here, and that’s reflected in my music. My energy has changed so much. I’m not chasing girls in LA anymore; my music is more existential and more concerned with the bigger world. Going into this album I was nervous that I couldn’t write anything that wasn’t ‘Sexy Town, USA,’ which had been my old shtick. This album has definitely opened up a world of substance and depth that I didn’t realize I’d be able to access, because it’s something that I really hadn’t written much about before. This new music is a lot deeper and the vibe is heavier, and I’m proud and excited that I was able to write an album with as much depth across many different topics.” 

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