{"id":637755,"date":"2026-10-22T06:52:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T06:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/637755\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T06:52:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T06:52:13","slug":"ryan-hemsworth-numbskull-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/637755\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Hemsworth: Numbskull Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Case in point: \u201cNever Learned,\u201d wherein Hemsworth gets his childhood heroes Tegan and Sara<\/a> to cosplay as psychotherapists fronting a pop-punk band. Meanwhile \u201cBreak,\u201d with its grimy, compressed production and slowed down jungle beat, sounds like something that could have appeared on Liam Howlett\u2019s Dirtchamber Sessions<\/a>. \u201cBreed\u201d marries knuckle-dragging guitars and metalcore vocals with skittering hi-hats, producing a hybrid that\u2019s nearly as weird as 300SkullsAndCounting\u2019s recent work<\/a>. And while \u201cShifting and Tuning\u201d opens like a folk number, the guitar figure eventually collides with a stumbling rhythm at an odd angle; it feels, well, downright Hemsworthian.<\/p>\n

A few songs on Numbskull tilt toward the beat music Hemsworth is known for, but even these are remarkably abrasive. On \u201cOne Step,\u201d Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties<\/a> screeches through a distorted mic over a trunk-rattling 808 beat. \u201cBreak,\u201d with its fuzzy synth bass and massive drops, is maybe the closest Hemsworth has come to dubstep, and \u201cToy\u201d pushes that same bass sound to a near-industrial extreme. MSPAINT<\/a>, perhaps the quintessential modern-day rap-rock group, might be the ideal collaborators for this stage of Hemsworth\u2019s career, and on \u201cNo One Else,\u201d Hemsworth drapes MSPAINT frontperson Deedee\u2019s rapping over buzzing guitars and a beat that sounds like something the Bomb Squad might have produced for Public Enemy.<\/p>\n

Hemsworth\u2019s work has always spanned genres\u2014just look at his omnivorous DJ sets<\/a>\u2014but Numbskull positions him as a more traditional songwriter, underscored by the album\u2019s personal, earnest tone. \u201cSome of these songs were starting to be made while my oldest kid was on summer break and my youngest wasn\u2019t in daycare,\u201d Hemsworth recently wrote, \u201cso my association with them is just being daddy daycare all day and then making this music in the middle of the night.\u201d You can picture Hemsworth blowing off steam by working through these songs, without thinking about what might go off on the dancefloor. Admittedly, the album\u2019s \u201990s sound palette has echoes of millennial nostalgia bait\u2014but then again, when has nostalgia not been part of Hemsworth\u2019s appeal? Whether he was dropping Pok\u00e9mon samples<\/a> or decorating his productions with gameboy synths<\/a>, there\u2019s always been a yearning for youthful innocence at the core of his songwriting. Fatherhood can make you reflect back on your own childhood; Numbskull sounds like the work of someone channeling that time through the simple pleasures of loud, angsty music.<\/p>\n

\"Ryan<\/a><\/p>\n

Ryan Hemsworth: Numbskull<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Case in point: \u201cNever Learned,\u201d wherein Hemsworth gets his childhood heroes Tegan and Sara to cosplay as psychotherapists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[4958,430,156,111,139,69,1251],"class_list":["post-637755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-albums","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}