Ruston Kelly’s Pop-Punk-Inspired New Single, ‘Pickleball,’ Is His Version of Blink-182’s ‘First Date’ (Exclusive)

The fact that it’s only been seven years since Ruston Kelly released his debut album, Dying Star, feels crazy to me. I feel like I’ve lived two decades since the first time I heard “Jericho,” and yet… here we were… It’s 2025, and Ruston is about to release his fourth studio album, Pale, Through the Window.

Heralding the album’s arrival have been two previous singles — “Wayside” and “Half Past Three” — and now a third: “Pickleball,” a pop-punk-inspired track wherein Ruston recounts his exhaustingly sporty first date with his new girlfriend, Tia Cubelic. I had a chance to chat with Ruston via Zoom earlier this week and pick his brain a little about the track, the story behind it, and whether or not he’s gotten any better at Pickleball.

Musically speaking, I’m going to describe “Pickleball” as a Midwest (dirt) Emo song, to borrow his coined genre term. From the get-go, it’s apparent that it shares DNA with 2000s-era Blink-182, kicking off with bass line chord progression that will have you thinking of “What’s My Age Again?” or “Stay Together For The Kids.” This is something, Ruston revealed, that was completely intentional.

“I think ‘Pickleball,’ the title, it just fit for that riff,” he said. “The song is the most like dirt emo type song [on the album]. It sounds like it could be on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (Blink-182’s 2001 album). It kind of sounds like that, and that was intentional.”

As for the story behind the song’s lyrics, Ruston shared that “it wasn’t a blind date,” then going on to explain that he and Tia “randomly met in South Carolina” in a “tiny little beach town” that both of their families have been visiting for decades. As they talked, the two eventually discovered that they lived pretty close to one another in Nashville.

“I asked her to hang out in Nashville,” Ruston recalled, then getting the question that led to this moment, “and she’s like, okay, like, ‘do you play pickleball?’”

“In my head, I was like, like, ‘I’ve never played pickleball in my life,’” he confessed, but of course, as will happen when you find yourself smitten, his mouth didn’t get the memo. “I was like, ‘Oh, for sure. No, for sure,’” he said with a laugh, adding, “I rolled up there not knowing what to expect, and kind of just like completely dove into a new scenario.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by rustonkelly (@rustonkelly)

Funnily enough, Ruston noted that some “people are kind of scratching their heads” over the song title, wondering if it’s literal, “but it’s just [that] pickleball only occurs as like a precursor to the actual song itself.”

When it comes to actual pickleball, Ruston says he’s “getting better,” but was fully transparent that Tia bested him on their first date. “Like, she kicked my ass, when we played. She’s really good.”

“I was just like sweating actually, [which] I say in the song. Like, I was sweating bullets,” he added, then revealing that there was a second factor working against him that day. “I thought it was a good idea to try and quit nicotine, but then I was like, ‘Well, fuck, I shouldn’t just like be a weirdo…’ So, I popped in a Zen pouch and it made me kind of nauseous and it made me sweat more,” Ruston recalled while laughing.

Joking about how this “met [his] match” with this “beautiful girl” who was “absolutely dominating me on the court,” Ruston says he eventually realized there was a song here and its name was “Pickleball.”

Ruston’s new album, Pale, Through the Window, will be out September 12 via Rounder Records. Click here to pre-order it and find all his streaming links, and see above for all dates and tickets to his upcoming fall/winter tour, which will formally kick off in October. Expect more from my chat with Ruston in the coming weeks.