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A bedroom auteur from Northeast Louisiana has spent five years building a gothic mythology no one asked for, and that everyone, it turns out, needed. His debut album “What Happened to the Skull Boy?” It stands out as one of the most unusual and self-contained rock albums to come out of this region in recent years.
The harpsichord arrives first, followed by the bass, a thundering Fender P rolling low and insistent beneath the humidity of a Louisiana midnight. By the time the mono trumpet synthesizer enters, eerie, somehow comic and unmistakably itself, it is already too late. You are inside the world Jackson Culp built.
Culp, 25, is the architect, sole laborer, and reluctant narrator of what he calls “vampire rock,” a genre tag he coined not as a marketing gambit but as a confession. From his personal studio in West Monroe, Louisiana, the award-winning actor turned bedroom auteur has spent the better part of five years writing, performing, producing, mixing, and mastering every note of an interconnected gothic mythology on his own, with no outside help, just the heat of Northeast Louisiana and the hum of magnetic tape.
“Vampire rock means emotion. Someone with a dark and mysterious exterior who is bursting with feeling on the inside, someone not understood,” explains Culp.
His debut full-length, What Happened to the Skull Boy?, which was released in January 2026, is the third chapter in that mythology, and it has already earned broadcast attention from LA 105.3 FM, NPR affiliate KEDM 90.3, FOX 14 KARD/KTVE NBC 10, and the Ouachita Citizen, accumulating over 10,000 streams since release. The momentum builds on a foundation Culp constructed largely alone: more than 375,000 YouTube views, 100,000 TikTok likes, and 75,000 streams accumulated across two earlier releases.
His first release, The Lagoon, followed two people who despise each other vacationing together in a tropical paradise; a bitter, specific portrait of transactional love curdled at the source. Everyone’s Favorite Vampire traced the aftermath: the arrival of a seductive but sinister figure, someone who seems inviting until the fangs appear. The new album closes the current arc with seven tracks about a “mysterious, decaying, once-dangerous character” who enters an arrangement he doesn’t fully understand. Culp is careful to note the arrangement always comes due.
“I was tormented by the idea of what happens after enormous success,” Culp explains. “Even if someone gains absolute status, achievement, and knowledge, after enough time, that power evaporates. These thoughts were suffocating. They led me to ask what an all-powerful, immortal character, one who has remained for too long, would do to stay relevant.” The answer he arrived at: give up the soul. There is, he says, always a collection on that deal.
The mythology, Culp insists, revealed itself rather than being constructed. “The line between character and creator,” he says, “blurs intentionally.”
Culp is a 2019 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival National Award recipient (“Distinguished Achievement in a Play”) who grew up in community theater and traded collaborative performance for something more solitary and, perhaps, more dangerous. Writing a song, he says, feels like inhabiting a character. The difference: “Without pretending.”
The creative process itself is just as solitary as the mythology. Culp begins most songs on a stringed instrument, using a ukulele or guitar, and then takes the idea immediately into Ableton, his recording software, and builds the entire sonic landscape alone. “Most frequently, I record lyrics using a freestyle method,” he explains. “I play the track as I attempt to find the melody and lyrics simultaneously. This method helps me to not doubt the lyrical selection, as I discover in real time whether or not the lyrics fit the recorded music.”
The Tape Machine in the Thrift Store
In October 2024, Culp stumbled across a TEAC A-2300S reel-to-reel tape machine at a thrift store. The find became integral to the record’s sound. He recorded each finished track to tape and then re-recorded the vintage master back into his digital software. This process coats the album in a texture that crackles with age and electricity simultaneously. “By the end of finishing the entire album,” he says, “I knew I had used all of my equipment to the absolute maximum of my ability. I affected the material, and then the material affected me.”
The album took 24 months to build from the ground up. Culp recounts periods of creative paralysis that he now understands differently in retrospect. “I was not stuck in the process,” he says. “I simply had to wait for personal experience in order to unlock the next piece of the project.” The different seasons he navigated — the frustration, the reckoning, the dark realizations — didn’t obstruct the record. They became it.
The Sound: Louisiana After Dark
Sonically, vampire rock is harder to categorize than the name suggests. The gothic snarl of the Misfits is present. So is the desert swagger of Queens of the Stone Age, the shadow-soaked narrative instinct of Nick Cave, the sleek nocturnal cool of Arctic Monkeys, the moody shimmer of Tame Impala. What emerges from the synthesis is something genuinely regional: Louisiana after dark. Spanish moss as curtain. Humid midnight air and flickering streetlights along empty highways. The music feels haunted but playful, seductive but dangerous — an intoxicating mix of rock and textured indie pop occupying the same fever dream.
Culp describes vampire rock as “an amalgamation of rock, indie, alternative, darkwave, funk, soul, and then sprinkled with the sensibilities of hip-hop.” The full band idea, he says, frames the entirety of the sound, which is then recolored through the collective lens of a lifetime of listening. “We never want to limit ourselves creatively,” he says, “but we do understand that certain limitations inspire innovation. Because of this, we are unafraid to experiment sonically, but are also attempting to further our sound while staying true to the main principles of rock music.”
The band, called Jackson Culp and the Company, is rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Culp, and brothers Rex Bolls on bass and Nate Bolls on drums. The band performed alongside Grammy-nominated Bowling for Soup at Green Street Monster Fest in 2025, where organizers described the experience as entering a world “where eerie beauty and emotional truth collide, a space that feels as cinematic as it does deeply personal.”
On LA 105.3 FM’s morning show in March 2026, host Big Jim offered a four-word review on air: “Your music is awesome.” On TikTok, influencer Nick of @nicksmusictaste — with an audience of more than 180,000 — heard the music and responded with three: “Chilling. I just got chills.”
A spring 2026 tour runs through Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas, with early stops including March 19 at Flying Heart Brewing in Natchitoches, March 20 at Flying Tiger in Monroe, and March 21 at Mustang Sally, also in Monroe. The run continues March 27 at the Delta Sig Formal at University of Louisiana at Monroe, followed by April 4 at Key City Brewing in Vicksburg, Mississippi; April 18 at Ollie’s Skate Shop in Longview, Texas; April 24 at Louisiana Tech in Ruston; and April 26 at Flying Heart Brewing in Monroe. In May, the band heads to Fat Jack’s in Texarkana, Arkansas, on May 15 and Fondren’s in Shreveport, Louisiana, on May 16, before wrapping this stretch on June 20 at Enoch’s Irish Pub in Monroe.
The Origin of the Obsession
The catchy lead single, “Down Honey,” Culp says, began with a ukulele impulse on a quiet morning. “I thought the song would be more groove-based, but as the recording process progressed, the rocking, dark energy seemed to be the truth.” The track anchors itself on a reverberating harpsichord, a pulsating Fender P-Bass, and a mono trumpet synth that the frontman describes as his entry point into the whole record. “This was the first piece of the sonic puzzle that totally intrigued me,” he says. “This off-the-wall synthesizer — a mono trumpet — was different from any instrument I had used before. It has a comical sound, but also an eeriness, if used in a specific way.” The opening synth melody, he says, set the tone for the entire album; stranger, more synth-driven, a more peculiar rock ‘n’ roll amalgamation than anything he’d attempted before.
Listen here to“Down Honey” and on Spotify.
Elsewhere, the song “Big Genie” represents what Culp calls his “first foray into absolute strange funk madness.” “Far Out!” holds him with its opening guitar riff and closing groove. The record travels from the raucous opener through seven tracks that ask listeners, in his words, to “sink their teeth into this project and ruminate on it in its entirety.” Follow the band on their IG, TikTok, YT, and Website.
