Awsten Knight hates change, but when heading into Waterparks' sixth album JINX, he knew that something had to give. Building "from the ground up", the pink-haired visionary sacrificed his comfort zone in every way he could to deliver his most challenging album yet, and, as he reveals to Kerrang!, allowed him to reconnect with the childlike wonder of discovering music...
“Bear with me as I form my morning thoughts,” Awsten Knight begins. His brain is still booting up at this early hour, its gears having not yet been greased by his usual morning coffee. Instead, he’s sipping on some warm lemon water from a mug that reads ‘MAMA NEEDS HER COFFEE’ as he explains how Waterparks’ sixth album got a title that sounds as bold and crunchy as ‘JINX.’
“It's a name that really grew with the album in a very ironic way,” he says. “After deciding not to do [cancelled album] INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 2, I wanted to start over with a blank slate. That’s why I didn't even have a hair colour when this era started and it was just blonde. I wanted it to be like a canvas and let the album build as we go and add more colour.
“But there were just so many problems that it felt extra ironic, as if I jinxed the process a little bit. By physically, analytically and administratively reapproaching Waterparks in a way that we’ve never done before, we were like, ‘We’re going to approach this with such light and positivity,’ and then it was an avalanche of, ‘Holy shit.’”
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 2: LOST IN THE PROPERTY was wiped off the release slate partly due to a cocktail of bureaucratic headaches and uncanny mishaps, and partly out of Awsten’s desire to preserve his mental health instead of rehashing his religious trauma again and again. Craving a reset, Awsten believed that change was necessary to clear the fog from his mind ahead of their next chapter. It led the band – Awsten, guitarist Geoff Wigington and drummer Otto Wood – to separate from the majority of their team, including their label. As you’d expect, such a drastic change doesn’t come without some friction.
“It was really fucking difficult,” he sighs. “When so much of your life is creative, you only talk to these people all day, every day, from all these different factions of your team. It felt like losing everybody all at once, or some friends would work there and I'd be like, ‘Fuck, I guess I don't talk to them anymore.’
“It was very lonely, but so conducive to having a fresh start with everything, because at that time it just felt so heavy. I was like, ‘I just can't pursue an entire cycle like this,’ and it felt like I put a needle in the fucking balloon, it popped, and now, ‘Okay, I can fucking breathe. It’s so much easier to start building from the ground up rather than on a shifty foundation.”
As necessary as this momentous shift was, Awsten still had to grit his teeth as he ripped up the band’s shaky foundations. Doing what’s right isn't always what’s easy.
“I hate change. I love routine. Stability is fucking awesome.”
“You self-sabotage any time you don't f*cking believe in yourself”
When it came to creating JINX, Awsten took that urge to do things differently to its extreme, making himself as uncomfortable as possible. Distancing himself from his creature comforts, he sought to engineer an environment that was so unfamiliar to him that he was bound to create something different inside its walls. It’s why JINX is the first Waterparks album to have been made outside of Los Angeles, with Awsten swapping the City Of Angels for the hustle and bustle of New York.
“I think your surroundings have a lot to do with your output,” he explains. “I was like, ‘Am I just gonna keep making the same shit over and over, if I’m still in my apartment?’ In a way, it is a contradiction to who I am and what I like because I know I could sit down and work a certain way, but I just wanted to see if the output would be different if I changed everything. Environment, people, look, clothes, instruments, everything.”
Awsten wonders out loud more than once if this is a form of self-sabotage, or in other words, if he became his own greatest jinx. Even when we question whether this change-prone mentality truly constitutes self-sabotage, given this sounds more constructive than destructive even in a backwards kind of way, Awsten maintains that it’s a double-edged sword. It was effective, but he had to bleed to get there. And, in a way, self-sabotage has still trickled into the music he’s made.
“So many of the songs are about the conflicts that come with growth,” he says. “Most of the time you are being your own biggest enemy, whether you mean to be or not, and [you] self-sabotage any time you don't fucking believe in yourself. This album is so encompassing of that, and of life, that it's hard not to look at each song as an individual moment and acknowledge my part in all of that.”
“Can I draw a diagram?” Awsten asks us.
Do it, we say. Why not?
And with that, he grabs a pen and draws four circles on a page. Each of those, it turns out, represents a clock face, as he illustrates how he designed the Easter egg in the video for JINX’s unfiltered early single IF LYRICS WERE CONFIDENTIAL that revealed what the album title would be. The four letters in the word JINX were represented by a series of times on a clock, one hand drawing an X, for example, by moving from seven to 11 to two to five.
It’s on-brand behaviour from one of the most exacting minds in rock and alternative. The act of making music and crafting the visuals around it is, for Awsten, an act of world-building. His goofy, caps-lock loving online persona belies a man who’s deadly serious about his art, so much so that it even leaches into his physical appearance, given that each new Parx era finds him dyeing his hair a different colour. For a synaesthete like him, colour is incredibly important, as the blaring, bright hues of Waterparks’ aesthetic have always conveyed.
He’s determined and he’s passionate, but embedded deep into his psyche is an unshakable sense of perfectionism. It’s both a tool and a cage.
“The pain [of changing so much around me] comes with giving a shit,” he explains. “If I didn't care and if I wasn't such a perfectionist about Waterparks and creativity in general, a lot of that wouldn't be there because there wouldn't be the drive that pushes me into the situations that ultimately become songs. I’ll be like, ‘This album's gonna be awesome but my brain is gonna be tortured now for however long until this thing’s done.”
“This was the most challenging album to write ever”
During JINX’s writing process, that perfectionism was tested more than ever. Collaborating with Patent Pending’s Joe Ragosta, who had previously co-written parts of INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Awsten’s high standards paled in comparison to Joe’s even more demanding sense quality control, stretching the singer in ways that almost had him wobbling.
“Working with Joe is fucking really challenging because he forces me to account for every word and syllable,” says Awsten. “It was the most challenging write ever for me. I'm used to writing and being like, ‘The verse is fucking awesome, this pre-chorus is fucking awesome, the chorus is perfect, I can’t think of anything I would change.’ Then he’ll come through and poke holes and be like, ‘So that's the best line you have for that one? Look at me in the face and say that's the best version of that.’ Naturally, I'll get competitive, and I'll be like, ‘Fine, yeah, it should be better,’ and then we wind up rewriting songs five times over.
“I know it’s for the best and good things aren’t typically incredibly easy, but writing JINX definitely hurt my confidence a bit, or at least it made me start questioning or second guessing, which wasn’t Joe’s goal. He’s also technically right, the songs wouldn’t have ended up where they are now if he didn’t push me to that place.”
Was it an ego death of sorts?
“I think unless you moved to the mountains, you didn't have a real ego death,” Awsten reasons. “But I do think that it definitely took some hits. I've been doing this a really long time. I've been writing songs for more than half my life, extremely consistently. I'm like, ‘I better be fucking really good at it.’ Right now, I could probably pick up a guitar and make a song happen. But this process definitely made me step back and evaluate things.”
The other tactic Awsten used to push himself was to give a megaphone to his younger self, asking himself what his childhood self would gravitate towards musically. More importantly, he conversed with himself in a manner as loud and blunt as a child with a still-developing mental filter.
“Child me was harder to impress with music,” Awsten remembers. “I knew instantly if I really loved a song. [I heard] In Too Deep by Sum 41, which scratched something in my brain, but then they’d go incredibly punk and I’d be like, ‘Why didn’t they do In Too Deep again?’ Now I’m like, ‘How the fuck do I impress this little asshole?’ He didn’t know what a chorus or harmonies were, but he was just like, ‘That’s cool.’ I wanted to create fun moments back to back to back to back, that I could listen to in the car with kid me, and he'd be fucking amped on the whole thing.”
We already know that JINX is a time capsule of Awsten’s growth. When he spoke to us just as the album was announced, he told us that he’d grown more between these album cycles than in any other time since Waterparks has existed. Perhaps this was always to be expected, though, given there's a bigger gap between INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and JINX than between any of Waterparks' other albums. “The album covers three and a half years – that's like an entire high school experience!”
As an example of that personal growth, Awsten says he's a better communicator now. “I've had harder conversations with people, whereas if I was unsatisfied before, I would just try and make it work,” he explains. But he's also recalibrated how he engages with the outside world.
Awsten never used to be deeply political. Looking back now, he believes having such a level of unawareness was “irresponsible”, but as the world darkens with the ongoing rise of the far-right, there is no excuse for staying ignorant. In a departure from Parx’s usual songwriting, he dropped a spur-of-the-moment petrol bomb of political fury in the form of ICE in January 2026, a tirade against the Trump administration and the barbarity of the agencies responsible for carrying out his mass deportation initiative, and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
That politicism returns on JINX’s moving closing track, GIRLS NEED GUNS. It’s the song Awsten believes is the most significant example of his own personal growth, because as he wrote down and crossed out lyrics, trying to figure out why the song wasn’t working, he realised he shouldn’t be at the centre of it. He had developed the wisdom to know when to pass the mic.
This is how it came to be that Waterparks’ new album features Awsten’s mum Ginny speaking about abortion. ‘I graduated high school in 1975 / I was 16 when abortion became legal,” she says over strummed guitar chords, as if Awsten has left the door ajar to let us eavesdrop on a conversation he and his mum might have in the living room. ‘And yes, I feel like it’s part of your healthcare… they don’t give a shit about a baby / It’s just about controlling women.’
“Seeing that stuff every day is so fucking heartbreaking and so weird,” he explains. “I have these conversations with my mom all the time because she fucking hates Trump and the whole administration and everything that it stands for. We talk about it a lot, or she'll send me like 40 articles a day. It’s soul-crushing to constantly see these levels of evil, people actively working in the world to like make it worse, and it felt impossible not to write because it almost felt irresponsible writing about anything but that. It just felt like the absolute least I could do.”
There is, at least, a silver lining.
“My mom is fucking amped to have a songwriter credit!” Awsten says. “She's so psyched. I had our day-to-day manager at the time reach out and help her make one of those royalty accounts, and she's like, ‘Ooh, what's this for?’ I didn't tell her I was [using her voice] at first. I was like, ‘If you don't want this, just tell me, and I will scrap the whole thing.’ I showed her, and she just fucking loved it.”
“My mom is amped to have a songwriter credit!”
When we ask what state of mind Awsten is in at the end of JINX's journey, his immediate response is, “Exhaustion and tunnel vision.” There's still items on the to-do list to cross off such as tour scheduling, merch designs, a promo campaign... but there's still a glint of satisfaction in the process.
“It’s towards a greater goal,” he reasons. “Right now, I’m okay with being tired because I want to honour this body of work.”
Once it’s on shelves, the next step is to refocus. The process of creating JINX has been so taxing that Awsten’s not written any music since it was completed.
“JINX took my shit!” he says. “I need to meditate. I need to touch grass. I need to put my feet in a pool. I need to work out. I need to run.”
As he reclaims whatever JINX took from him, Awsten also gets to sit and watch it resonate with people. “The sharing part” of the record cycle, as he calls it. It’s the scariest, but the most rewarding.
“Certain songs I heard changed my trajectory entirely,” he says. “If TELL ME WHY causes someone to want to write a play or a fucking book or whatever or if GIRLS NEED GUNS is somebody's first time really thinking about something like that from that perspective if they live in a red state household, and they get their worldview from their parents, it might change something for people. It might change someone for the better.
“At the very least, it might bring someone some joy.”
JINX is out now via BMG.
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