In August 2022, Mark Hoppus walked onstage to sing a song he didn't write, for a band most of the room had never heard of, in his first live performance in two years. He'd spent that stretch in cancer treatment. The song was "Almost Famous," a guest vocal he'd donated to a three-piece from Los Angeles called Beauty School Dropout, and for three minutes the biggest name in modern pop-punk stood in service of a band he'd discovered while they were, by their own account, sleeping in cars in San Diego.
From a Thrift Shop to the Fun Bus
Beauty School Dropout formed almost by accident in late 2019 or early 2020, when Cole "Colie" Hutzler, fresh off the collapse of an earlier band called Strangefaces, met producer Bardo Novotny through a mutual friend at a show. Within the week, Hutzler and bassist Brent "Beepus" Burdett were in Novotny's studio, and the three have worked together nearly every day since. They call themselves "the fun bus": Bardo is the engine, Beepus is the brakes, Colie is the steering wheel. Their first show, in 2021, was in a thrift shop. Debut single "Last Time" had already dropped in February 2020, but the pandemic scrapped a planned South by Southwest debut and instead gave the trio a year and a half to figure out, in their words, who they actually were.
Renegade-Pop, on Purpose
What they landed on doesn't sit still. The band coined its own term, "Renegade-Pop," for a sound that folds pop-punk, emo, glam, grunge, metal and even Jersey club production into a single project rather than picking one lane.
We wanna blend everything.Beauty School Dropout, Kerrang!
Reviewers have heard the Killers in "Two of Us," My Chemical Romance in "Sick Puppy," the 1975 in "Sex Appeal." The band cites Motley Crue, Deftones and Van Halen as reference points, and it writes fast: by its own account, 50 to 100 songs get generated per album cycle before a tracklist survives the cut, with Colie handling roughly 99 percent of the lyrics despite the collective writing process.
Verswire, Hoppus and the Artistic Bodyguard
Discovery came at a low point. Beauty School Dropout has described real financial hardship in its early days, including homelessness in San Diego, before Mark Hoppus heard the music and signed the band to Verswire, the label he co-founded with Pete Wentz and Veeps founder Sherry Saeedi. The band has described Wentz's role, filtered through Hoppus's mentorship, as something like an "artistic bodyguard." Their 2022 debut LP, We Made Plans & God Laughed, carried the proof: a Hoppus guest vocal on "Almost Famous," plus writing credits from All Time Low's Alex Gaskarth and a young Los Angeles alt scene that also included Slush Puppy. Rob Cavallo, the producer behind Green Day's biggest records, is credited on the earlier Boys Do Cry EP too. Every full-length the band has released since, three in total, has come out on Verswire.
A band that once slept in cars got a cancer survivor's first stage return, for their song.
The Scene That Built the Songs
Royal & the Serpent is the band's most personal collaborator, not a booking but a relationship. Beepus has said plainly that she was his girlfriend at the time they met, and she's featured twice: on "Starphucker" from the 2021 EP and on "SEX APPEAL" from 2025's WHERE DID ALL THE BUTTERFLIES GO? The band's other defining feature came from Jaden Hossler, a friend from a charity bowling event years before either act had a fanbase. "FREAK," built from a beat Novotny was working on that Hossler topline'd on the spot, became the band's biggest streaming song at the time, nearing half a million plays in its first week, and the two acts got matching tattoos backstage in Boulder to mark it. That early-2020s Los Angeles circle, hanging together and throwing parties at On The Rocks on the Sunset Strip, also overlapped loosely with poutyface, phem and Christian Gates, whose Atlantic remix of Royal & the Serpent's "Overwhelmed" landed in February 2021, months before "Starphucker" surfaced on the same scene's radar. No direct collaboration between Beauty School Dropout and Gates is on record, but the timing places them in the same room for a stretch that shaped both.
Arenas Without the Chart Entry
Beauty School Dropout has never logged a confirmed Billboard entry, and its Spotify monthly listeners have slid from a reported peak above 700,000 in April 2023 to roughly 362,000 more recently. None of that has slowed the touring math.
The band opened arenas for Turnstile in 2023, played every stop of the revived Vans Warped Tour in 2025, performed inside the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to roughly fifteen fans while museum visitors wandered past, and joined blink-182 and Alkaline Trio's Missionary Impossible Tour alongside Landon Barker. In April 2026 came the biggest jump yet: direct support across the North American leg of Machine Gun Kelly and Wiz Khalifa's Lost Americana World Tour, arena rooms in San Diego, Austin, West Palm Beach, Charleston and Concord, far past the crowd that once watched them from a thrift shop floor.
Still the Fun Bus
Beauty School Dropout still resolves internal arguments by having two members wrestle until someone's pinned. It still calls its shows parties rather than performances. Six years after a scrapped South by Southwest slot and a mentor's cancer recovery, that instinct, refusing to sit still, refusing to be pinned, has become the whole career.