Teen Wolf star Tyler Posey is working with Jack Barakat from Maryland punk-pop band All Time Low on a new project. The MTV actor, who spent years in a punk band in his native California, has a ready-made fanbase, a couple of million followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and isn’t interested in signing a record deal.
“It’s about to get big,” Posey told Billboard in an exclusive interview in Toronto, while in town to present an award at the iHeartRadio Much Music Video Awards. “The collaborators are big, and my music career is about to take off.
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“It’s so early in the works, but Jack from All Time Low, he and I have become really good friends over the past year, and just recently we talked about producing something with each other and writing music with each other. So we’re about to do something really big and, hopefully, do a collab with a bunch of other punk guys. It’s all punk. My whole life is punk. That’s all I want to do is be performing punk onstage, so it’s going to happen. Within the next year, I guarantee you.”
The 24-year-old fronted Lost in Kostko, briefly renamed Disappearing Jamie, for more than three years until September 2012. He joined Teen Wolf, playing lead character Scott McCall, in 2011, and is now also a producer on the show. But he still posts recreational music clips, singing with on acoustic guitar, on his YouTube music channel.
“It’s called ‘Music for Your Ears to Bleed To,’ because I’m not the best singer nor guitarist,” he says in one video. “I don’t want people to think I’m posting these videos to say, ‘Hey, look at me. I’m really good at guitar and singing.’ It’s mostly because it’s awesome. It’s just so much fun.”
In the July 2015 video post, he reveals he was at Comic-Con when All Time Low invited him onstage to sing with them. “I didn’t know that was going to happen,” he says, adding that in one of his podcasts he mentioned that “a fantasy of mine is being pulled up onstage by one of my favorite bands and singing or playing an instrument with them. And it happened. I almost cried; it was so cool.”
Posey told Billboard his singing voice is “not screamo, but I yell. It’s all fun. The music I write is very melodic, very catchy and fast.”
Always drawn to that style, Lost in Kostko formed in 2009 in Santa Clarita, Calif., playing “aggressive punk pop” in the vein of Blink-182, The Offspring, Green Day, Sugarcult, NOFX, it says on their defunct Reverb Nation page. They released an eight-track EP, You’re Going to Need a Towel, and played the Roxy three times in 2011 and 2012, the final time as Disappearing Jamie.
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“I grew up playing music, ever since I was 10 years old,” Posey says. “First I started with bass, immediately started playing guitar after that, so I was going in between bass and guitar. Blink-182 and punk music have been my life since I was a kid. Naturally I wanted to start a punk band.
“So I started a band with one of my buddies. We played for a long long time. Covers of Blink-182; covers of Green Day. Started writing our own stuff. I started taking it more and more seriously. I found a drummer. He and I would jam. We went to an open-mic night in our local town and started from there, eventually started recruiting more musicians and eventually started selling out the Roxy, which is a pretty big venue on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
“Our last show was with one of my favorite bands when I was a kid called the Ataris [in September 2012]. So music is a huge part of my life. It’s the only thing I really focus on. I love acting and I love performing, but now some big stuff is about to happen with my music.”
Posey also played the titular character in former Blink-182 guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge’s live-action version of his Poet Anderson multimedia project, which is a book series and award-winning animated short.
“Blink-182 has been my favorite band since I was a kid. It’s actually the reason why I have my fingernails painted black right now, because Tom DeLonge had his fingernails painted black,” Posey told reporters in the MMVA media room. “Our paths crossed at one point…He asked me if I wanted to be the lead of it and so I was immediately really excited to do it. He’s my idol. He’s the only person I’ve ever idolized my entire life. He changed my life.”