On Your Instagram

Steel Panther never needed a modern gimmick to get the joke across, but "On Your Instagram" proves the old hair-metal punchline still lands when the target changes. Track three on On the Prowl, the band's sixth studio album, is a slow-burn power ballad that sounds like it was built for a 1987 lighter wave and then aimed straight at a phone screen. Michael Starr sings it like a man who just found out the angel on the other end of the chat was a filter, a ring light, and a whole lot of nerve. The chorus is the whole gag and the whole heartbreak at once: why can't you look like you do on your Instagram. Catfish used to mean something that lived in a river. In this song it means the person who showed up in real life after a week of perfectly toned skin and eyes that only God, or an app, could have built.

On the Prowl landed on February 24, 2023, on the band's own Steel Panther Inc. label, self-produced, thirteen tracks, just under forty-eight minutes. It was the first full album with new bassist Spyder after Lexxi Foxx stepped away in 2021, and the first since Heavy Metal Rules in 2019. The sequence puts "On Your Instagram" right after "Friends With Benefits" and ahead of "Put My Money Where Your Mouth Is" and the nostalgia anthem "1987," so the record moves from a modern hookup joke into a slow confession and then into a party song that wants the decade back. Reviews at the time, including an 8 out of 10 from Blabbermouth, treated the ballad as the place where the band proved they could still write a real verse before they blew the punchline. Starr falls for an angel staring through his phone, compares the face to something Michelangelo had nothing left to paint, and then watches the illusion collapse. By the bridge he is asking the question the whole Instagram age refuses to answer: if nothing is real, why does it still feel like something.

The video, directed by J. T. Arbogast and released in October 2023, turns that lyric into a public service announcement the band would never actually deliver with a straight face. Assistants to two influencers finally quit after deciding they would rather be the real version of themselves, and the constructed worlds come down. The band plays the song in an arcade while Starr delivers the line about a filter so beautiful it looks like God himself had built her. Later in the lyric the eyes could only have come from AI, which was already the punchline in 2023 and has only gotten meaner since. Steel Panther had already written about MySpace and Angry Birds in earlier years. This one is the grown-up version of that bit, a ballad that sits in the same neighborhood as the old community-property gag, except the con is digital and the sucker is the guy still following the account after he knows better.

The men behind the spandex have been working this lane longer than most of the apps they are mocking. Ralph Saenz, the voice you hear as Michael Starr, came up through the Los Angeles club circuit, sang with L.A. Guns on the Wasted EP in the late nineties, and fronted the Van Halen tribute Atomic Punks. Russ Parrish, Satchel on lead guitar, and Darren Leader, Stix Zadinia on drums, locked in with him as the act moved from Metal Shop to Metal Skool and finally to Steel Panther in 2008. Travis Haley, Lexxi Foxx, held the bass chair through the rise. Weekly Monday shows at the Viper Room, then the Key Club, covers of the hair-metal hits mixed with originals that treated the Sunset Strip lifestyle like a costume that still fit. A Discover Card spot billed them as Danger Kitty. The Drew Carey Show let them play themselves. Hole Patrol, the 2003 EP, carried "Death to All but Metal." Feel the Steel arrived in 2009 and put them on a major label with songs that sounded like Van Halen colliding with Mötley Crüe and a Wayne's World script. Balls Out followed in 2011 and opened at number one on the Billboard comedy chart. All You Can Eat, Lower the Bar, and Heavy Metal Rules kept the joke loud and the solos louder. On the Prowl is the independent chapter, written by Starr, Satchel, Stix, and Spyder, with a guest guitar turn from Dweezil Zappa on "Is My Dick Enough" and a closer called "Ain't Dead Yet" that doubles as a mission statement.

What keeps "On Your Instagram" from being a novelty is the arrangement. It runs about four minutes and forty-seven seconds, slower than the party tracks around it, built on the same stacked harmonies and clean guitar tones that power ballads used when the only filter was a soft-focus video and a wind machine. Starr sells the romance first. He wants the girl for his wife after looking at her for moments. Reality sears his eyes within a week. He is haunted for life, still staring, still following, still hoping a long enough look might make the illusion true. Manipulation makes the fat people thin and the short people tall, and the Instagram age has ruined us all. That last line is the one a classic-rock station can actually hang a break on. The dirty joke is the setup. The hangover is the song.

Steel Panther have always been a tribute band that refused to stay a tribute band. They learned the riffs, the poses, and the between-song patter from the groups that owned 1987, then wrote originals that treated those groups like scripture and stand-up at the same time. "On Your Instagram" is the rare cut that drags the costume into the present without losing the costume. You can hear the same vocal leap Starr used on the Feel the Steel ballads, the same Satchel sustain that nods at George Lynch and Warren DeMartini, and a rhythm section that knows when to stay out of the way of a confession. Spyder's first album with the band does not reinvent the low end. It keeps the pocket wide enough for a slow song to breathe, which is exactly what this one needs.

If you want the rest of the record, the official home is steelpanther.com, where the tour dates, the store, and the Fanthers club all live. The verified Facebook page is facebook.com/steelpanther. The band's Instagram, which is either the perfect place or the worst place to post this song, is @steelpanther. On X they post as @Steel_Panther. The long-running fan hub is fanthers.com. And if you want this kind of cut without a commercial break barging in on the solo, the place that still plays album rock like it matters is THE ZOO.

Put "On Your Instagram" next to the old power ballads and it holds up, which is the only test that counts. The filter will change. The app will change. The feeling of getting played by a picture will not. Steel Panther just wrote it down in the key of a Sunset Strip slow dance, and left the punchline sitting there where a guitar solo used to be.