GQ

It began about a month ago, when the band accepted a last-minute offer to play a house party near the University of Southern California. It turned out to be a raucous affair—and a lightbulb moment that rearranged their entire approach to touring. “At USC, I saw a Gen Alpha kid get raised in the air by his community, and I saw the veil lift,” says frontman Tyson Ritter. “His eyes were as big as plates…and I just felt like this is something great, so why not do it again?”

Reinvigorated, the band has spent the last few weeks on a brief but extremely viral house party tour throughout the US, which found them shredding in an Iowa barn, a Minneapolis bowling alley, and the back yard of a house in Nashville, where someone cut a hole through the fence to get a glimpse of the band. “Fuck, man! We played 12 shows in 10 days. We are not young boys,” Ritter says. “I've never played 12 shows in 10 days in my entire career.”

In the spirit of communing with fans sans traditional gatekeeping and ticketing websites, the band is launching a new online presence—on the subscription-based social-media platform OnlyFans, whose association with a different kind of intimacy is something they’re well aware of. Ritter is a little secretive about precisely what people can expect from the All-American Rejects' page, which is free to join and, at press time, nudity-free. But Ritter is bullish on what he thinks OnlyFans can do for the band’s relationship with its audience.

“I think most people don't realize that OnlyFans was a product of the pandemic that started as a Patreon for artists,” he says. “And then it was infiltrated by a genre that made it become a bit of a trope. It’s a platform that is offering an experience where the artist can set the price, and it's artists-to-fans. There's no middleman, there's no subscription costs, unless that artist chooses to do that. That seems like a good thing.”

Ritter chatted with GQ about this unexpected venture, what it takes to get people’s eyeballs (and ears) on creative work in an age of fractured attention, and one of his bigger career regrets.

GQ: So you’re starting an OnlyFans.

Tyson Ritter: Yeah, I'm starting an OnlyFans. And the All-American Rejects are behind me doing it, and it's really nice to be supported by my band in this wild adventure of 2025 for us. The last three weeks…I don't think anybody would have expected the All-American Rejects to make a ripple in the water ever again. And so the excitement behind this whole thing is like, Where else can we be disruptive? We've always been a band who's got a tongue bursting through the cheek when it comes to our music. So why not, you know, do a little peen bursting through a zipper?

What can people expect from your OnlyFans?

They can expect full-frontal rock and roll with all access

.

What does that mean exactly?

I'll leave it to the vagueness of that statement to define itself.

Do you see a relationship between this OnlyFans venture and the house parties that you've been doing over the last couple of weeks?

Of course. I mean you have these concerts now where you pay to access. It's like a tiered system, right? You have a GA ticket that costs baseline, I don’t know, $250? I think it's more than that. Some of these concerts are like $300, and then in order to get the closer experience, the tier system goes through the roof. I mean, we're bringing people to OnlyFans, and we're saying you're not going to pay anything. If anything, maybe you'll pay 69 cents just because we're little cheeky cats. We're not trying to offer a VIP meet and greet that you just empty your account and max out a credit card. I heard some people have credit cards now just for their concert expenditures. Like, what the fuck happened man?

There are so many platforms to disseminate creative work and put it in front of people now. In spite of that, it seems that artists don't have as much leverage now.

I think about the young band in their garage that haven't broken on TikTok. Because all the young bands think that if they don't break on TikTok that they're not going to be a success. Because now that's the rule: have a gimmick, hopefully the art is in there somewhere to be found. And if you trick people into liking it, then maybe you get to introduce it. Young artists that want to play a mom and pop venue? Those things are getting fucking shut down left and right because of the reality we live in. If I was a young band in a garage, my band wouldn't even have a chance. I'm new to the TikToks. I'm doing my best to contribute without feeling like I'm not being true to myself, because I feel like a lot of things feel very performative on that platform. And a lot of that platform is bought by major labels: $2 million creator campaigns to get your music in front of the world. Is this authentic? Is this real? Yeah, you had payola [on the radio]. Payola feels like it was a fucking kids game.

I hope places like OnlyFans can drive young bands to saying, Hey man, here we are. We want to be able to play shows. If you like the music, give us a buck. And if there's 1,000 of you, that's one thousand bucks. And maybe we could rent a venue for a night, buy onto a show. Like, there's unlimited possibilities for fans that are directly connected to the artists to be able to champion a band they like. The purest way to make the cream rise. This shit will be found, and wants to be supported.

In this new reality that we're in, in order to get any attention for art that you’ve put so much time into, no matter how successful you've been, you have to almost become a brand ambassador or an influencer to disseminate that work. What’s lost for an artist in that arrangement, you think?

It’s when the art becomes content. When art becomes content, you are commodifying inspiration, and you are destroying our culture by not sincerely approaching your gift. Maybe you are creative. Some of these people probably are truly talented that are even casually doing this, right? But the approach is what's corrupt sometimes. All I can do, as the elder statesman, man, is just sit back and say, How can we scream in this vacuum for the kid in his garage?

You were recently reminiscing about how your band used to pile in a van and play VFW halls when you were first coming up. For the audience, going to those intimate shows is so often how subcultures happen, right? You're communing with people in this particular way. The internet is so useful for connecting with people, but I’m not sure that grasping at TikTok microtrends can build sustainable subcultures with other people.

I don't think so either. A great example of small voices that are fighting the fight is in Minneapolis. There's a group of musicians that started a band helper fund called TCUP. They put on the show in Minneapolis with us. Unfortunately, due to rain and fire code in the basement—there was only one exit—[we had to move it]. We really dodged a bullet, not compromising the safety of our audience there. But we ended up going to a bowling alley, and 5,000 people showed up. They were willing to stand in the rain for four hours in hopes to get a free show. What does that say to the human spirit of desire to connect with music, when there might be inaccessibility to it now? And that’s a shame.

But I'm so grateful that a little band from Oklahoma had a chance to do something with a spirit of just genuine interest to not only reconnect with them, to reconnect with ourselves and where we started. I feel like this was a gift to our younger selves. That we had no expectations, that it spilled out into something that became more of a cultural conversation, is something you just can't predict. Now we're on the other side of it, there's this responsibility ringing true. I want to see other bands doing this. Internally, people are like, man, people are gonna copy this.I'm like, I don't give a shit! Fucking copy this. Fucking lay it across the United States. Stare eye to eye with the person who loves what you've given them.

Are you looking to do more of these house party shows now?

Yeah, we want to do it thoughtfully. I mean, we've had 700,000 people RSVP for this. And when you have an onslaught like that, you need to stable yourself and do a thoughtful re-assessment of how to do this thoughtfully, to where the crowd is safe, to where we have an infrastructure in place and I'm not calling for two porta potties at 3 pm in Ames, Iowa, when 5,000 people are filling up a latrine to the brim. People were running through cornfields. I literally was like, we need two more porta potties. Thank Christ they landed, like, right when we hit the stage and then the floodgates opened. I saw a girl popping a squat next to her boyfriend. I was like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. She's like, Can I have a picture? And I was like, This is feral.

I heard that people were also wriggling through fences and renting ladders to get on rooftops to see you at these house parties?

People were selling two beers for 15 bucks behind a fence, which I thought was actually a decent deal. Way cheaper than an amphitheater. And then yeah, some sly dog…I guess he must have had a hoard of ladders. He was renting them out for 150 bucks behind a fence in Nashville. We were paying for [a] fence that got two boards, like, chopped open by some scallywags trying to sneak in through the side street.

I want to play a roller rink because I want to see people shooting the duck and playing snowball while we play. Then a foam party. We're totally gonna do a foam party. A company hit us up and they're like, Hey, we would love to blow foam at one of these. That sounds fucking fantastic. Probably have to get new instruments after, but I've never been invited to a foam party. I wasn't cool enough to go to a foam party.

Has it been freeing for you to do things in a DIY way since you aren’t currently working with a major label?

Absolutely. We were just putting together our vinyl as a band. And I said, There's a guy at a label whose job it is to do this, and we're having a creative experience doing it. As opposed to when I was young. It was like, Here's your record, here's the layout. Do we have to be on the record cover for Move Along? Yeah, you look good. Really? Because our first record was this cool go-kart that was from my childhood pasture. And it expressed something about where we were as a band, where we come from—Oklahoma—in a dirt road, go-kart kind of thing. Americana for the All-American Rejects. And then the second record, there was a shift. We went over to Interscope Records.

[The Move Along cover] is probably one of the bigger regrets of our career, because it told our audience: We are a pop band now. A lot of our fans are like That first record, man… Well, it's like, part of you might have liked that first record because you have your whole life to write your first record, and everything about it was pure. My best friend Erin rummaged through my grandpa's junkyard to find that go-kart. I can’t look at that Move Along record cover in anger. That, to me, is like a tattoo you wish you could remove. But also, she's been there the whole time that you're like, Ah, well. I made that choice.

I like that way of putting it: how some decisions feel like a tattoo that you wouldn’t get now but you can appreciate that it happened.

Look at this, lady. [Pulls up his right sleeve to reveal a tattoo of an electrical socket and a cord running through to his chest.]You think a power outlet on your right shoulder at 18 is something you're gonna be like, “Badass!” at 41? That’s ol’ blue right there. But I haven't rubbed her off, because that's a part of my story.

This conversation has been condensed for length and clarity.

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