It started with a tree.
Late at night outside his mother’s law office in Monroe, Louisiana, Jackson Culp would step outside and look up at the enormous, gnarled tree rising against the dark sky. Birds nested in its branches. Strange sounds drifted down from the canopy. One night it occurred to him that an entire world was living in that tree, invisible to anyone passing below. That image lodged itself somewhere deep in his imagination and refused to let go.
The idea of something massive and alive hiding in plain sight became the seed of WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SKULL BOY?, his debut full-length album released in January 2026 and the most ambitious piece of work he has produced in a recording career that began when he was still a teenager teaching himself the ukulele in the backseat of his mother’s car.
Culp is 26 years old. He grew up in a household where Christian music was the soundtrack of daily life and theater was his primary creative outlet. His path to music was not direct. The guitar felt too difficult at first. The ukulele, purchased for twenty dollars at a local thrift store, was where it began. The first song he learned was “Riptide” by Vance Joy. The day he could play it and sing at the same time, something shifted permanently.
The electric six-string came later, a Christmas gift from his grandfather during his senior year of high school, paired with a small amplifier. That combination changed everything. By the summer after graduation, he had written his first original song. He remembers the logic he used to keep going: if I have written one, I can write a second. Then a third. He had cracked the barrier by crossing it once, and after that there was no reason to stop.
What makes Culp’s story unusual is not just the music he makes but how he makes it. Every note on WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SKULL BOY?, every instrument, every production choice, every mix and every master, comes from one person working alone in his personal studio in West Monroe. He calls this total creative isolation not a limitation but a necessity. Since his earliest experiments with recording in 2019, the process of building a sonic world entirely on his own terms has felt not lonely but intoxicating. He started out in community theater, where everything was collaborative by definition. The discovery that he could build something entirely alone, that the whole shape of a sound could live inside a single person’s imagination, was a revelation he has never fully gotten over.
The results across three connected releases have been singular. Culp coined the term “vampire rock” to describe what he makes, and the label holds up. Imagine the gothic weight of Nick Cave pressed against the groove-driven menace of Queens of the Stone Age, the raw confrontational energy of the Misfits filtered through the atmospheric cool of the Arctic Monkeys and the psychedelic shimmer of Tame Impala, then run through the heat and darkness of a Louisiana bayou and you are somewhere in the neighborhood. But not exactly there. The sound has its own logic and its own emotional temperature that belongs to no one else.
The catalog tells a single story across three acts. THE LAGOON, released in 2021, began with two people trapped together in something they could not name, two hate-filled lovers adrift in a beautiful tropical nowhere. EVERYONE’S FAVORITE VAMPIRE followed in 2023, deepening the darkness and introducing a figure who presents as charming and then reveals something genuinely dangerous underneath. The new album closes the current arc with the Skull Boy himself, a character who was once formidable and is now decaying, who makes an arrangement with forces he does not fully understand in an attempt to recover what has been lost.
“The album tells the story of a guy who used to be powerful and dangerous but he’s gotten old,” Culp explained. “One night he gets summoned into a tree by an otherworldly presence. They make a deal to stay in power. And that’s where we leave it–with the question of what happens next.”
The question of what happens next is one Culp already has an answer to. A new album concept is already forming, following this same character further down the road of a deal he should never have made.
Bringing the album to life technically required a breakthrough Culp did not expect. While thrifting in October 2024, he found a used reel-to-reel tape machine, a TEAC A-2300S from an earlier era of recording. He had been obsessed with vinyl for years but had never had access to analog recording equipment. He was not even sure the machine worked. He researched it, figured it out, and began running his finished digital recordings through the tape machine and back into his computer. The result was a warmth and texture that his purely digital recordings had never achieved. By the time the album was complete, he felt he had pushed every piece of equipment he owned to the absolute edge of what it could do.
The album opens with “Down Honey,” the lead radio single, which began one morning when Culp picked up his ukulele half-awake and stumbled into something that felt more groove-based than it turned out to be. The dark, rocking energy that emerged over months of recording was truer than his original instinct. The track is built around a reverberating harpsichord, a pulsating Fender P-Bass, and a mono trumpet synthesizer that Culp describes as carrying a comical sound that becomes eerie in the right context. The lyric at its center came from a period when Culp was consumed by a particular idea: that success contains the seed of its own ending, and that the awareness of that ending can be paralyzing. The line “Don’t lie to me today / Just say it’s going down, honey” was born directly from that reckoning.
The album moves from there through seven tracks that each contribute a distinct chapter to the Skull Boy’s story. Culp performs the music live with his bandmates bassist Rex Bolls and his brother and drummer Nate Bolls. The band, which has operated under the name Jackson Culp and the Company since their debut at the Strauss Youth Academy for the Arts in Monroe in August 2022, has evolved through multiple lineup changes while maintaining its essential character. The live show is built around red lighting, atmospheric fog, and the full physical weight of music that was conceived in isolation but delivers something communal and visceral when played in front of a crowd.
The spring 2026 tour has taken the band to venues including Mustang Sally in Monroe, a room that has hosted Lainey Wilson, Dylan Scott, Cowboy Mouth, and David Allen Coe. Regional broadcast coverage from FOX 14 KARD, KTVE NBC 10, and NPR affiliate KEDM 90.3 accompanied the album’s January release. LA 105.3 FM’s morning show hosts praised the music on air. On TikTok, a creator with more than 180,000 followers heard the single and offered three words: “Chilling. I just got chills.” Green Street Monster Fest described the experience of the music as entering a world where eerie beauty and emotional truth collide, a space that feels as cinematic as it does deeply personal. Breakline Press notes, “For Jackson Culp, music isn’t just something you hear, it’s something you step into.” Meanwhile, the ULM Hawkeye paper says, “Culp’s music fuses blues with a contemporary take on rock. His sound could be described as smooth and almost ghostly.” SoniqLoox adds, “Jackson makes vampire rock in Northeast Louisiana, not as costume, but as confession.”
Culp knows what he is doing, which is not exactly the same as knowing how it ends. He does not plan the mythology in advance. He follows it. Vampire rock, he has said, revealed itself to him rather than the other way around. The character who started in a tropical paradise with someone he resented, who grew darker and more desperate across two EPs, who now sits in a tree having made a bargain he cannot escape, was never fully conceived before the music arrived. Culp writes from inside the story, discovers where it goes, and then lets the recording process complete the picture.
That willingness to not know in advance, combined with a technical obsession that extends to hunting down vintage tape machines at thrift stores and spending months on a single chorus, is what makes the work feel both handmade and genuinely ambitious. There is nobody else in Northeast Louisiana, or anywhere else, doing exactly this.
“I want people to dream when they hear the music,” Culp has said. “I want it to take them someplace else, to ignite their imagination.”
He is not trying to fit into a scene. He is building one.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SKULL BOY? is available now on all streaming platforms. CDs and the full EPK are available at jacksonculpofficial.com. The spring tour continues across Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas through June 2026.
