When NF announced a collaboration with Machine Gun Kelly, the pairing seemed almost prophetic.
Both artists have spent years excavating their personal trauma through music, refusing to hide behind manufactured personas.
“WHO I WAS,” the third track on NF’s FEAR EP released November 14, 2025, stands as their first joint effort, a raw meditation on generational pain, anger management, and the versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown.
The Sonic Architecture
The track opens with stripped-back acoustic guitar, immediately establishing an atmosphere of bare honesty.
This minimalist approach feels right for the weighty themes both artists address. The production, handled by Aaron Chafin, NF, and Jeff Sojka, layers pitched-up vocal samples that haunt the chorus, creating an almost ghostly presence that represents past selves watching from the shadows.
Throughout the song, distorted electronic elements punctuate the acoustic foundation, representing the chaos both artists describe in their verses.
These sonic disruptions mirror the emotional turbulence in the lyrics, pulling listeners between moments of calm reflection and aggressive intensity.
The production choices reflect NF’s signature style while accommodating MGK’s genre-fluid approach, resulting in something that feels neither fully hip-hop nor entirely alternative, just devastatingly honest.
mgk’s Confession Booth
Machine Gun Kelly opens with a verse that reads like therapy notes set to rhythm. His delivery comes rapid-fire, barely pausing for breath as he navigates through personal trauma.
The Cleveland artist has never shied from vulnerability, but this verse finds him particularly unguarded.
His opening imagery hits immediately, searching for a home he’s never known with no address to guide him.
The metaphor extends when he compares his scattered heart to his father’s ashes accidentally dropped in a rental car.
It’s an uncomfortable, visceral image that captures both carelessness and grief. This isn’t sanitised pain; it’s the messy, complicated reality of loss and regret.
mgk threads religious imagery throughout his verse, discussing his two-decade absence from faith and his eventual return.
The reference to being embraced “like I’m His Son” without judgment carries particular substance, especially given his public struggles and controversial moments.
He’s searching for unconditional acceptance while acknowledging the archetypes he’s expected to fulfil.
The verse grows darker as mgk references losing a best friend, crying at an open casket.
His mention of having a best man selected for a wedding that never happened, replaced instead by guilt he carried, maybe alludes to his relationship with Megan Fox and their broken engagement.
The line “I left everything behind but this engagement ring and a frozen heart” encapsulates the emotional damage he’s still processing.
NF’s Generational Anxiety
Where mgk sprints through his verse, NF takes a different approach, measured, almost conversational at points, before building to desperate admissions.
His section centres on a fear many parents understand: becoming the dysfunction you experienced as a child.
The Michigan rapper looks at his own children and feels sadness, hoping they won’t replicate his patterns.
“Hope they don’t wind up like Dad, stuck in this loop like I am” functions as both confession and warning.
He recognises his anger issues, his tendency to overreact, the push-pull dynamic where he professes love then treats people poorly.
This self-awareness doesn’t equal self-forgiveness, though, NF seems trapped by knowledge of his flaws without knowing how to escape them.
His repeated line “wasn’t taught that in my house” acknowledges how trauma perpetuates across generations.
Emotional regulation, healthy communication, appropriate responses to stress, these aren’t innate skills. They’re learned behaviours, and when your childhood home didn’t model them, you’re left fumbling in adulthood.
The verse structure itself reinforces the cyclical nature of his struggle. After describing his need to “take a breath and calm down,” he repeats the same lines again, literally creating a loop in the song’s structure.
It’s a clever technical choice that embodies his feeling of being stuck in repetitive patterns.
The Chorus as Shared Language
Both artists join for the chorus, their voices blending over the simple admission that everything they care about is “burning up.”
The fire imagery connects to NF’s broader FEAR project, where his mental mansion burns on the album cover.
But here, the flames represent something more universal, the destruction of former identities, relationships that couldn’t survive personal growth, and the painful process of transformation.
The pitched-up vocal effect on certain words creates an eerie quality, like hearing echoes of who these artists used to be.
Nothing remains of their previous selves, reduced to ash and dust. There’s grief in that acknowledgment, even when those former versions caused harm.
Why This Collaboration Matters
NF rarely collaborates, making his choices significant when he does. His partnership with mgk signals mutual respect between artists who’ve been dismissed, criticised, or pigeonholed throughout their careers.
Both have faced accusations of being too emotional, too dark, too concerned with their own pain.
Yet their willingness to be vulnerable has created dedicated fanbases who see their own struggles reflected in the music.
The track works because neither artist tries to outperform the other. mgk doesn’t attempt to match NF’s rapid-fire delivery in his own verse; NF doesn’t shift to rock-influenced vocals to meet mgk’s recent aesthetic.
Instead, they each bring their authentic approach, creating complementary perspectives on similar themes.
The Therapeutic Function
“WHO I WAS” operates as public therapy, which has become both artists’ signature approach.
There’s something cathartic about hearing successful musicians admit they’re still carrying damage, still struggling with anger, still afraid they’ll hurt the people they love.
It normalises seeking help and acknowledging pain rather than performing invincibility.
The song doesn’t offer solutions or neat resolutions. Both artists remain works in progress, aware of their issues but still wrestling with them.
That honest admission might prove more valuable than false optimism. Progress isn’t linear, and growth doesn’t mean you’ve conquered your demons, sometimes it just means you’ve learned to recognise them.
Final Thoughts
“WHO I WAS” succeeds as both a collaboration and a confession. The sparse production keeps focus on the words, while the emotional performances from both artists create genuine connection.
This isn’t commercial calculation or strategic genre-blending, it’s two people who’ve weaponised their pain through music, finding common ground in their shared willingness to examine their darkest corners publicly.
The track will resonate most with listeners who’ve asked themselves similar questions: Will I repeat my parents’ mistakes? Can I break generational patterns? How do I express love when anger comes easier?
These aren’t abstract philosophical questions, they’re daily struggles for anyone carrying childhood trauma into adult relationships.
In making their pain public, NF and MGK create permission for others to acknowledge their own.
That’s the power of vulnerable art, it transforms isolation into community, shame into shared experience.
“WHO I WAS” won’t fix anyone’s problems, but it might make them feel less alone in facing them.
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