How Hot Mulligan created unflinching yet ultra-fun pop punk with Why Would I Watch
You wouldn’t necessarily know from song titles like “Christ Alive My Toe Dammit Hurts” or “Cock Party 2 (Better Than The First)” what lies inside Hot Mulligan’s third album, Why Would I Watch. You might think that the Michigan emo band, whom perhaps you know as the genre’s court jesters that do things like advertise a gallon of milk on their merch store for $1,200, would pack these songs with the same jokes about dicks and jacking off that they do their tweets. Instead, what you get is a haunting expulsion of generational trauma, grief, self-hatred, and regret. Oh, and it really, really rocks.
“Catharsis is important,” frontman Tades Sanville says. “In general, it seems like people suck at coping with their issues. I’m no good at it, so I write songs about it. If you look online or you talk to other people that are going through this stuff, we all fall into the same habits and the same routes of self-medication and self-deprecating jokes. But you can go to a show. You can drink and dance a little. It’s a very loose connective tissue, I guess, but it’s there.”
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That’s an understatement, given Hot Mulligan are a band beloved by fans — you’ll catch them at shows crowdsurfing, screaming along, even sporting tattoos of the band’s lyrics or ghost logo. They’ve drawn that kind of support since their first album, 2018’s Pilot, and built on it with their second, You’ll Be Fine (both released on No Sleep Records; for Why Would I Watch, they’ve switched to Wax Bodega). When we chat, they’re on their first-ever U.K./EU headline tour; they’ll be returning for a second in a few months. They’ve also gotten to open tours for massive artists like New Found Glory and the Wonder Years, and they’ve been booked for this year’s When We Were Young, headlined by blink-182 and Green Day.
But before their current ever-expanding success, the band (Sanville, guitarists Chris Freeman and Ryan Malicsi, and drummer Brandon Blakeley) spent years grinding away on thankless DIY tours. “Sometimes it was dogshit, and people just stood there and stared at you; sometimes it was so dogshit there wasn’t even someone there to stare at you,” Freeman recalls with a laugh. “[It was] still fun,” Sanville adds. “Just go, play shows, every now and then you’ll have a good one. [It was] financial ruination, but also really fun.”
After a few EPs and steadily building support on the road, they put out Pilot, a cathartic if fairly straightforward emo album. You’ll Be Fine was a big step up musically, on which they tried out more advanced and nuanced songwriting, plus some left-field ideas like funky grooves and mathy riffs, claiming the genre tag “post-emo.” But for Why Would I Watch, the band were less interested in experimentalism. They worked on the record for almost a whole year, and they wanted to use the time, plus their expanded resources, to simply follow their instincts.
“Nothing about the way that the record sounds was influenced by anything other than, ‘This just feels right when we’re doing it right now,’” Malicsi says. “It was just, ‘Let’s do what feels really good,’ and then whatever felt really good ended up sounding good, and ended up being a little more stretched out than just the core sound. It was cool to write everything in person with each other in the studio for the first time, instead of in our parents’ basement or on our computers.”
As a result, the album is their most anthemic and polished. The huge choruses on songs like “It’s A Family Movie She Hates Her Dad” and “No Shoes In The Coffee Shop (Or Socks)” are made for yelling along at shows and sticking in your head for days after. The lyrics, meanwhile, are consistently unflinching. “Guilty fate, hope my father don’t take it on himself if I’m gone,” Sanville sings on the opening track “Shouldn’t Have A Leg Hole But I Do,” a track about hopelessness and suicidal ideation. “It’s A Family Movie She Hates Her Dad” is about getting trapped in generational cycles of substance misuse, while closing track “John ‘The Rock’ Cena, Can You Smell What The Undertaker” examines the effects of religious trauma. “A lot of shit’s really, really bad all the time, and it doesn’t really improve. That’s my whole shtick,” Sanville admits.
Sanville names the acoustic ballad “Betty” and the twinkly, ruminative “Smahccked My Head Awf” as the two most meaningful songs on the album to him. Both equally heartbreaking, the former is a tribute to the death of a pet, while the latter was written about his dying grandmother — “I’ve written all these songs all meant for you/But I’ll turn into a stranger before too soon,” he laments. “Some writers will do the whole ‘You’re in a better place’ type writing, and that always really cheapens the experience, I think — unless you’re making a Christian rock song,” he says. “But I’m not a Christian, and when something or someone you love dies, I think that writing objectively about how bad that sucks is a more cathartic and important thing to write.”
You won’t catch Hot Mulligan sugarcoating anything; their lyrical approach combined with their goofy and approachable sense of humor steadfastly pulls from the reality of living with depression. “You can be sad for a while, but mostly, it’s just indifference toward life,” Sanville says. “So, we are goofy and stupid and also depressed and down. They go hand-in-hand naturally as a pretty common coping mechanism. It’s like the permeating emotion [of the songs]; it rises to the top ’cause you’re like, ‘I wanna write a love song…I kinda wanna kill myself.’ It’s always there, and it’s always poking. So it comes very naturally to write about it.”
It’s this feeling that has made fans connect so hard to Hot Mulligan; they’ve provided a place for people to hear their darkest experiences represented and externalized, and to exorcise those demons in a room together, just as the best bands of the emo genre have always done. It feels like the band are creating a legacy in real time. Yet, they’re not sweating the future too hard, they say — they’re just trying to keep doing what comes naturally to them.
“Something I’ve learned from hanging out with the bands who are a generation ahead of us is as long as you’re genuine and you maintain your career in ways other than just the music, the future is there for you if you want it,” Malicsi says.
“Yeah, just don’t lose focus,” Freeman adds. “If you stay driven and passionate about what you do, you can do it for longer than you would have expected.”
“I think as long as we love what we do and the people that surround us are good, and we treat them well and we keep our heads down and just do what we came here for, it could last as long as we do,” Malicsi adds.
