Tickets to My Downfall

Tickets to My Downfall is the fifth studio album by American musician Machine Gun Kelly. It was released on September 25, 2020, by Bad Boy Records and Interscope Records. The album marks a departure from his established rap sound and became a more guitar-driven pop-punk album. It was his first collaborative project with drummer and producer Travis Barker, and features guest appearances from Halsey, Trippie Redd, Blackbear, and Iann Dior, as well as Bert McCracken and Yungblud on its deluxe edition.

Tickets to My Downfall was preceded by the release of the singles: "Bloody Valentine", "Concert for Aliens" and "My Ex's Best Friend". The album was a commercial success, debuting atop the US Billboard 200, his first to do so. It was well received by critics, and went on to be his first album to be certified platinum by the RIAA.

Machine Gun Kelly had released four studio albums through the 2010s. While his first four studio albums had been hip hop/rap styled, by the end of the decade, Baker started moving into a rock music direction. In 2019, Baker appeared in the film The Dirt, a biographic film about the band Mötley Crüe where he played drummer Tommy Lee. The same year, Baker released his fourth studio album, Hotel Diablo, which ended with the track "I Think I'm Okay", a more rock-leaning song collaboration with Yungblud and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. It was released as a single and became very popular, hitting number 8 on the year-end Billboard US Hot Rock Songs and ended up being certified platinum in the US.

Baker, wishing to explore the sound further, booked a day in recording studio to work with Barker, to record what would become the song "Bloody Valentine". The session was so powerful to Baker that he asked Barker to set aside two months for them to collaborate on an entire studio album, to which Barker obliged. For much of the rest of the year, Baker would refer to working on the album informally referred to as "the untitled pop punk project". Along with Baker on vocals and guitar, the entire album would feature Barker on drums and as a producer.

Prior to the recording of the album, Baker expressed a wish for the album to include features from Bert McCracken of the Used and Chris Fronzak from Attila. The album went on to feature collaborations with Halsey on the track "Forget Me Too", Blackbear on the track "My Ex's Best Friend", Trippie Redd on the track "All I Know", and Iann Dior on "Nothing Inside", as well as McCracken and Yungblud on "Body Bag", from the album's deluxe edition. Other collaborations in the studio included Goody Grace, Mod Sun, Young Thug, and another collaboration with Yungblud. "Body Bag", features heavy similarities to Fall Out Boy’s 2005 single "Dance, Dance", which require clearance from the band for use, which was given by Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump just a day prior to release. Baker also noted that the album originally concluded with a track titled "Times of My Life", but that he couldn't get authorization to publish the song from Tom Petty's estate, who felt the hook was too similar to a song of Petty's. A year after the release, Baker noted that Corey Taylor of Slipknot had recorded some vocals for an unidentified track, but Baker wasn't happy with how it turned out and it didn't make the album. Conversely, Taylor argued that he passed on the song himself, stating he was not happy with the song ideas he was presented with on the track "Can't Look Back".

Contrary to the hip-hop style of Baker's first four studio albums, Tickets to My Downfall was designed by Baker to be a pop-punk album. Baker created a more guitar-driven and live instrument sound in hopes of inspiring a younger generation to learn guitar. He wished to use the sound to branch out to a larger demographic as well, and succeeded, with Baker noting that his own father liked his music for the first time in his career. Tracks "Bloody Valentine" and "Concert for Aliens" were both described as "pop punk", while "My Ex's Best Friend" was described as having a more modern take on the genre, not quite "the same 'classic' pop punk vibe". The album's delay to September 2020 was something Baker felt worked out in the end, as he noted that the album has a summery, good-times vibe that he felt people could appreciate in enduring the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Baker used a metaphor related to the Goodyear Blimp to explain the meaning of the album title, stating:

As soon as that Goodyear Blimp catches on fire, or that thing starts falling from the sky, I guarantee you every single eye is going to look up at it; every single phone is going to capture that moment; every single person is going to talk about that, right? ‘The Goodyear Blimp fall from the sky.’ But do the headline ever say when you wake up on this casual fuckin’ Wednesday that the Goodyear Blimp is floating, alive and well? No. And that’s kind of sad: that it takes you to crash and burn to get people to pay attention to you again. Tickets To My Downfall couldn’t have been my debut album because...I had to get to a certain height to then decline and crash, and people are aware of this height that I’m at, and they don’t want to see it rise anymore; they want to see it crash. There had to have been a journey for people to care about to still be tuned into, to then see destroy.