“It’s The End Of The World But It’s A Beautiful Day” - Thirty Seconds To Mars Album Review

Can an album be considered disappointing when it turns out exactly as expected?

Thirty Seconds to Mars leaves that question pondering in the heads of a majority of listeners following their new release “It’s the End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day.”

Seemingly everyone knew this album wouldn’t be good and somehow everyone knew exactly what it would sound like. Yet it still comes across so poorly that the inevitable bitter taste the music leaves is harsher than could have been imagined.

Maybe that lies in the renewed disappointment at what Thirty Seconds to Mars has become.

Jared Leto has turned what once looked like an innovative rock band into a shell of itself that just released an album loaded with 11 accidental lullabies.

Lullabies perfectly describes the sound of this album as every asinine song sounds exactly the same as every other song on the track list and each one is so ungodly boring that listening will make anyone act like a child before bedtime, meaning this album either puts one to sleep or makes them start crying uncontrollably.

Leto and his brother hyped this album up as an evolution in sound and creativity while marketing the release but as it stands, they were just playing “Joker” on their fanbase.

The “creative evolution” of their sound is simply taking all of the worst tropes of mid-2010’s pop music over faded instruments. They basically just copied Imagine Dragons, mixed it with the filter of peak pop Maroon 5, and managed to make the sound worse.

The album opens with the lead single “Stuck,” which is as generic of a techno-pop release as could possibly be created and leaves nothing memorable in the form of sound or lyrical content.

After the single release, Jared Leto stated the two-piece band wrote 200 songs that could have been placed on the album, which makes sense because, at the pace of the remaining 10 songs that made the project, it would likely take 200 songs to get any sort of meaning out of Leto’s lyrics.

The second track, “Life Is Beautiful,” is a repetitive, contradictory nursery rhyme that is followed by another song with the same structure, but worse, in “Seasons.”

The problem of songs sounding nearly identical is blatantly revealed in the two unconnected tracks “Love These Days” and “Lost These Days.” Leto didn’t even try to make any tracks unique.

The lyrics of the album jump between joy, regret, generic emotion, religion and a whole lot of different ways of singing “oh.”

Even within the songs themselves, the themes jump around with no clear message to decipher.

It sounds like Leto took a pile of words he heard in top-40 music and threw them into a bag to pull out randomly while writing.

It’s not shocking to see a nonsensible album coming from the star of Morbius, art imitates art.

The saving grace for listeners is that every song on this 33-minute slog is short and pointless.

While each song averages out to three minutes, it's hard to tell when one switches to another, making the experience feel longer than its concise runtime would portray.

“It’s The End of the World But it’s a Beautiful Day” is perfect for anyone who has trouble sleeping, as Thirty Seconds to Mars created the perfect cure for insomnia.

For anyone who actually enjoys music, look elsewhere so this degradation of the art form doesn’t change your mind. The album has all the tools to make any beautiful day feel like the end of the world.

Album Score: 1/10

Favorite Songs: None of them

Least Favorite Songs: All of them

Evan Smith is a third-year majoring in broadcast journalism. To contact him, email ers5828@psu.edu.