The plane is already in trouble. Ronnie Radke sits in a darkened cabin while the city glitters below; then the fuselage tears open and fire begins to eat its way through the night. Most action films would save this for their final ten minutes. Falling in Reverse use it as the opening argument of “Joseph.”
What follows is not a teaser for a confirmed new album. Released as a standalone single on Epitaph in September 2026, “Joseph” is a four-minute collision of metal, melody and movie-sized self-mythology. It takes its name from Radke’s middle name, and brings two voices with enough history to fill a festival bill on their own: Slipknot’s Corey Taylor and System of a Down’s Serj Tankian.
Ronnie Radke sounds like he is trying to outrun the wreckage
There is an unmistakable Falling in Reverse logic to this kind of excess. Radke has spent years treating the standalone single as an event, making each release feel less like a stop between albums and more like its own world. The theatrical sweep of “Watch the World Burn” and the Marilyn Manson-assisted “God Is a Weapon” prepared the runway. “Joseph” comes in faster, louder and with more passengers aboard.
It begins with a deceptive sense of space: piano, choral colour, a voice that has room to breathe. Radke can sound startlingly clear when he wants to, delivering a line with a controlled, almost conversational edge. Then he tightens the rhythm, pushes into a half-rapped attack and opens his throat into a growl that lands like a body blow. The pleasure is in the switch. His clean tone does not merely make the heavy passages heavier; it gives the song somewhere to fall from.
That range is the real centre of the record. For all the star power on the credits, “Joseph” does not hand its identity over to its guests. The guitars, electronic pressure and sudden changes of pace gather around Radke’s performance. It is chaotic, certainly, but not random: each new gear feels like another door kicked open in the same collapsing building.
Then the guests turn up
Taylor has been in Radke’s orbit before—he guested on Falling in Reverse’s “Drugs”—so this is not the shock of a first meeting. It is the force of a familiar voice arriving at exactly the moment the track can bear it. His harsh delivery has that rare combination of pitch, grain and timing: a scream that still seems to hit every mark. He does not blur into the wall of sound. He cuts through it.
Tankian does something stranger. When the arrangement softens beneath him, he brings a ceremonial gravity that makes the whole song briefly feel older than rock music. His phrasing rises and bends like a liturgy heard through the doors of an Armenian cathedral—a bishop preparing the last service before the apocalypse. That is a description of the feeling, not a claim that he is performing an actual church chant. The effect is uncanny because his voice can make one syllable sound like a warning and the next like mercy.
Putting Taylor and Tankian on the same track could have become a stunt. Instead, their contrast is the point. Taylor sounds built to survive the impact; Tankian sounds as though he has come to pronounce what it means. Radke moves between them, singing and snarling as if neither verdict will quite hold him.
A disaster movie that refuses to end
Director Jensen Noen’s video takes that musical restlessness and gives it a city to destroy. After the wounded aircraft descends over a grid of lights, the action drops to street level: motorcycles, gunfire, headlights in wet darkness. The camera never lets the night settle. A blast throws wreckage across the skyline, then the band appear in a black void above a rippling, reflective floor. It is as if the story has fallen through its own bottom.
Later, horror takes over. Radke is caught among cables and monstrous forms; a mass of bodies stretches towards a pale opening overhead. The video keeps changing genre without losing its thread: disaster picture, urban chase, supernatural nightmare, performance film. The connective tissue is Radke himself. He begins as a passenger in a doomed machine and ends looking less like a survivor than somebody who has made a kingdom out of the crash.
The scale is so outrageous that my first, slightly disbelieving thought was: surely somebody reached for generative AI, or this cost the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. But spectacle is not evidence of a particular tool. The published production credits name a director, cinematographer, stunt coordinator and visual-effects teams at Inception Post and TiltVFX. I have not found reliable confirmation that generative AI was used. If it did enter the pipeline, this is the standard it should meet: serve a director’s vision and expand the spectacle without erasing the artists and crews who made it.
A single with an album’s worth of ambition
Is every turn subtle? Not remotely. This is Falling in Reverse. Radke’s music has long preferred the grand entrance to the quiet knock, and “Joseph” is unlikely to persuade anybody who dislikes that instinct. For those willing to go with it, though, the song earns its size. The clean singing makes the growls hurt more. Taylor brings the impact. Tankian brings the omen. Noen gives all three a world that seems to be breaking under the weight of their voices.
There is no need to invent a promised album to make this feel consequential. “Joseph” stands on its own: four minutes and change, a burning plane, a black sea, three singers and the sort of ending that makes you want to start again just to see how you got there.
Watch the full “Joseph” video: Falling in Reverse’s official music video on YouTube.
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