CRÈME DE LA CREEM

It’s been said that music is just spicy air. Well, if that’s the case, then we’d like to intro you to the Mala Masala Scotch Bonnet Ghost Pepper-est of all air, Creme de la CREEM! Here we handpick four bands that we consider to be the spicy meatballs of tomorrow. Mamma mia!

HOTLINE TNT
By a stroke of luck on par with the discovery of penicillin, I first found out about Hotline TNT—the Minneapolis-via-Brooklyn, genreunconcerned vehicle of singer-songwriter Will Anderson—around the time they released their first video, for “Are U Faded?” The song hit one of the many parts of the brain that doesn’t do much thinking. It was reflexively addictive; guitars sounding like planes flying off in the distance, fluffy drums, laid-back vocals that still have the resonance of any music typically described as “emotional,” unabashedly stretching outside the “acceptable” in search of influence. Immediately I started making calls like Tony Soprano organizing a hit on some mook. (I’m sure Tony actually only had to call one guy, which I also did, but I’m sure the passion of killing a guy who has a family relying on his clandestine source of income and finding the remaining songs off a new band’s EP are roughly the same.) I listened the moment the tracks landed in my email, tapping my phone awake on the drive home from work so as not to miss a note.

“Stories like that are what I was going for,” Will tells me. “It was something special.”

He’s referring to the “you just had to be there” fact: For the first few years of Hotline TNT’s existence, you could only portably listen to their music via MP3s personally sent to you by Will, after transferring him some digital coin and providing your email address. That seemingly trivial, albeit symbolic, extra step to procure TNT's tunes gave listeners a sense of pride not unlike anyone of a pre-X generation bragging about having to “actually go to the record store and spend money” to find the soundtracks to their meaningless lives. Explains Anderson: “There’s something about keeping it off Spotify and corporate media that makes it more special and more of an adventure to find a band. I think people got more attached to the band because of that.”

Of course, you can’t keep making the rats hunt through the maze to find the cheese if the cheese itself isn’t scrumptious, can you? Hotline TNT, from 2018’s “Are U Faded?” to the newest LP, Cartwheel, hit a nerve with people. It’s hard not to talk about Hotline TNT in a series of contradictions, like a Democrat running for Senate. The music is somewhat familiar yet indescribable. It’s urgent yet laid-back. It’s gigantic yet intimate. It’s meant for steamy basement shows in the boondocks, but it’s got fucking Auto-Tune and record scratches. (The influence was “mostly Drake,” Will tells me.) Different sources across the cyber-sphere pitifully attempt to define them as “noise rock” and “shoegaze,” but to elevator-pitch TNT to your friends like this would undersell it.

Witnessing Hotline TNT in the act, you get to see the crosscultural inspiration for yourself. I managed to see them on a tour with the traveling label showcase for Oakland’s Smoking Room. Watching a bunch of teenagers stage dive, slam dance, and jut their chests out whilst wiggling their arms, you would think you were at Ozzfest ’98, except with only slightly fewer dreadlocks. The connection is not lost on Anderson: “I definitely want kids to headbang and stage dive. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We just want to make it fun and exciting for everybody.” Again, reaching outside the traditional scope of influence is a running theme with this band, with a matter-of-fact explanation of “I grew up listening to nu-metal. I still listen to nu-metal on a regular basis.” But then he clarifies: “Non-ironically.” Thank God.

Will has a masterful acquaintance with his songs, but while every chord he plays reads like second nature, he avoids any unnecessary flash or theatrics (although watching him give his guitar those bends like it’s a deep-sea diver succumbing to pressure is just as eyebrow-raising). On stage he’s the same way he is in conversation, or even in his songs—at ease yet at attention. Another sappy contradiction. The energy comes easy, and when the songs slow down, it doesn’t dissipate; it focuses. Kids who were just seconds ago on the verge of break-dancing are now transfixed by the explosion before them.

Watching them, I can’t help but relate it to something I literally could not have observed myself: skin-headed hardcore ignoramuses seeing Hiisker Dti transition from one of the fastest punk bands on earth to heartfelt balladry that kept the razor’s edge intact. The final product is exhilarating and wouldn’t be out of place in the end-credit sequence of a subversive coming-of-age movie, but the context of it all is still recognizable.

“I’m not gonna say I came from hardcore. I grew up not even going to hardcore shows, but kind of adjacent to it. Like, outside looking in, appreciating it, but I never made hardcore music. But the ethos is what really inspires me,” says Will. “I think Hotline comes from that world.” That would probably explain why it’s just as easy to see them in the midst of 2023’s windmill-palooza Sound and Fury Festival lineup as it is on indie-friendly Spotify playlists.

Yes, the band is now on the algo-rhythm giant and has been for a bit now. “As far as gatekeeping in music, if you wanna call it that, it definitely made it fun,” Will explains. “But time has gone on, the band’s profile has grown; at some point it kind of felt weird to keep it off [streaming] for too long.” With more attention cast on the band, the move toward streaming services and the recent signing to Third Man Records were pragmatic in nature.

“We did a tour in the U.K. last year with this band Island of Love, who’s also Smoking Room-related, and they got signed to Third Man after, like, five shows.”

Will remembers, “Third Man came to our show in the U.K., bought the record, and I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s the Jack White label’—that’s all I knew about it.” After some mutual follows on Instagram, deals were made.

But Hotline TNT are a band prone to changes. Interstate moves, a lineup that has shifted over time and depends on orientation to the Mississippi River (they’ve recently landed on a stable roster including Olivia Garner on guitar, Augie Beetschen on bass, and Mike Ralstom on drums), and label signings; listening to the progression of the band, Hotline TNT still stand alone. In an offhand comment during our conversation, Will says to me, “We’re doing our own thing.” No shit they are.

--ANDREAS LORETAN

THE NATIVE CATS
It’s out of fashion at the moment, but there are advantages to separating the art from the artist. Not exactly so we can all keep listening to our favorite fascists and abusers (though every time I read the lyrics to Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba,” I shed a single tear, mourning what might have been, had that singer not decided to forgo empathy for a career of hackish cruelty), but more that there’s something to be said for being able to step outside the art, if only to admire all the angles. On the Native Cats’ 2020 single “Run With the Roses,” Chloe Alison Escott sang, “I felt my body happening/To people on the street,” signaling that, for some artists and humans, a reliable narration is outside their control. Like all the greats (poetry, Christianity, Starship Troopers, etc.), the Native Cats are as much fun to misunderstand as they are to get nearly right. The post-punk duo of Escott and Julian Teakle—from Hobart, Tasmania, Australia—have, since their debut LP, 2009’s Always On, been operating outside of post-punk’s glass house; like that cartoon meme of the sicko drooling “Yes... Hahaha... Yes!” in the window of a House of Jealous Lovers. In fact, on that very debut, the Native Cats have a song called “Game of Numbers” that opens with Escott intoning, “If I step back any further/I’d be in the house next door,” where the intent is to express her ambivalence regarding a certain kind of scrawny-tuff post-punk anti-(but not really)machismo. Of course, in the hands of an expert on ambivalence such as the Native Cats’ singer, the song works just as well as a threat as it does as commentary; with the Native Cats martyring themselves as authors every time they record a note.

Since their debut, running through three ensuing long players and a handful of 7-inches, they’ve been doing their damnedest to avoid perfecting their sound. Or at least the sound that others heard. While there are few types more lazy than your average post-punk music critic (hours spent with the lyrics of Mark E. Smith inevitably lead to a spiritual malaise where the writers essentially throw up their hands and mutter, “I’ll just take your word for it”), critics seemed particularly eager to pigeonhole the Native Cats as either neo-Sprechgesang Albini-acs or desperate DIY bicyclists. Even as the duo said, again and again in interviews, that they were more interested in the effervescent space pop of bands like Broadcast than they were in re-creating the vein-bulging sounds of indie Chicago or industrial England. The misunderstandings are forgivable, however, considering the Native Cats’ talent for regularly accomplishing the highest goal of all post-punk: making the listener want to take up smoking and lose their virginity to someone with bad skin. And it’s not like anyone meant “cool as hell” as an insult.

Anyway, after initial comparisons to such bands as Young Marble Giants (the Welsh aggro-twee minimalists who, as is so often the case, the Native Cats had not yet heard a lick of), Escott and Teakle did only so much to correct that misapprehension. Rather, they doubled and tripled down on the bass-driven melodies, using synths and melodicas as cascading flourishes—like Einsttirzende Neubauten use canisters of ball bearings on sheet metal—while adding subtle Madchester touches and increasingly letting Escott’s open-heart exploration of her own voice (in both the vocal cord and vocal worldview sense) offset the economy—bordering on austerity—of the duo’s songwriting. If the duo never quite made their fondness for Broadcast as apparent as maybe they’d have liked, they created a singular enough catalog to, if not reverse time and influence Young Marble Giants, then at least allow for the possibility of some sort of Michael J. Fox-esque time traveler showing up at a Cardiff prom in 1978 to really blow the minds of the collected colossal youths.

It should be noted that—no cowards, they, in the face of the Ascendency of Sprechgesang—the Native Cats now seem okay with comparisons to Sleaford Mods and Dry Cleaning.

On The Way On Is the Way Off, the new album, these stalwarts of the Tasmanian underground (yes, it’s a thing) have once again made a work of art that both transcends and revels in the traditions we were always wrong to try to shove them into in the first place. If the listener wants this record to be in the vein of the Rapture, it is! If the listener wants to hear Big Black—throbbing funny car rock and rolla, where actual misfits douse themselves in petrol just to ruin the edgelords’ party—the listener is welcome to do so! Hell, if the listener is new and, hearing Escott petitioning for the right to exist through the prism of soccer chants, wants to see The Way On Is the Way Off as part of the Nu-Oi! Revival.. .the listener should feel free to go absolutely nuts. Australians are the skinheads of the world, and when, on the first single, “My Risk Is Art,” Escott sneers, “You/And your crew/You've been searching the earth for the boys from Brazil,” she does so with a bracing and righteous contempt that can only come from an unfortunate familiarity.

OR the listener can simply appreciate the possibility that, while the Native Cats can’t help but kid the rock every time they up jump the boogie, singing “Put some shimmy in your shoulder/Get in there, get shoved,” the duo should be taken on their own wily and inscrutable terms. This is not space-age pop, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t burning with possibility. There is, after all, the grace that Teakle imbues into even his most bulldozing basslines. There

is the soulful, Bronski-beatific lilt in how Escott delivers lines like “Summer comes slow, but it’s never late/ Your blood flows in a figure eight/And mine, too.” There’s the wow and flutter of the analog pianos, the ambient force of the synths, the way the whole album treats beauty like satellites we’re lucky if we catch a glimpse of. The Native Cats were never interested in post-punk meanness, and they’ve only grown more expansive in their desire to make those who might maybe understand them swoon. The tough have inherited the earth and, while we all live in the pit, we have no choice but to try to love someone.

--ZACHARY LIPEZ

FINAL GASP
I think I have them figured out. Not the band’s sound, specifically, but who Final Gasp REALLY are.

Follow me down the rabbit hole.

Final Gasp’s new LP and Relapse debut, Mourning Moon, rides the line of storm-cloud-addled post-punk, icy death rock, and remorseless goth-tinged metal to create a moody and furious middle ground between Killing Joke, Danzig, and Christian Death. If you were to look back to CREEM Comix in Issue #3, you’d see some of Danzig’s conspiracy theorizing about Obama. Add to that the conspiracy theories that Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke believes and lives his life by—aliens, the pyramids, Nostradamus, it goes on and on—and it would only make sense that these kids from Boston are probably somewhere in the same world. I mean, I can’t speak to Rozz Williams of Christian Death (R.I.P.) and his beliefs in the Illuminati or Stanley Kubrick’s moon landing video, but if this all lines up like I think it does, I got these boys pegged.

So I decide to get on a call and ask the band a little bit about their band and their release. Now, with a thing like this you can’t just jump right in and ask, “How many UFOs are currently being housed at Area 51?”—you have to ease your way into it. Throw some knowing glances. Maybe a few hints here and there. But you gotta start by making friendly on the first impression. That whole “he’s a good dude and one of us” kind of thing.

I start things off with a stolen voting machine joke that lands with about as much hilarity as a “Bazinga!” from The Big Bang Theory. Then I follow it up immediately with a joke about Pizzagate. Still no dice. I hit ’em too hard way too early, I guess. So I jump right into the meat before I dip back into the proverbial gravy—where did their sound, which is rather unique in the current realm of heavy music, come from?

“In high school, I was listening to street punk and then Blood for Blood. I grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts. I would see bands like Ramallah—14 years old and seeing that was crazy,” recalls vocalistguitarist Jake Murphy. “Local bands like Step Forward and later Mind Eraser and Soul Swallower were a huge influence when I was younger. A lot of those bands had the same rotating members who would play in several different styles of bands.”

I follow up with a comment on how listening to different styles of music can alter your worldview— kinda like how 5G is to all of our alpha brain waves. Still nothing. After a slight pause, Murphy continues.

“We have been playing in bands with each other for, like, 15 years. So we’ve grown together as musicians and incorporated a bunch of different elements into our music. And now it feels like it’s fully evolved with Final Gasp,” states Murphy. “And yeah, when I asked Alex [Consentino, guitarist] to do it with me, he said, This is a combination of everything you like! This is what you wanted to do the whole time.’”

We discuss intention versus action, to which I mention the crowd’s ascension on the Capitol. Again, nothing. So I move into the work of Arthur Rizk and how the band landed on the acclaimed producer and what their experience was with him.

“I kind of couldn’t believe it,” recalls Murphy. “I was really ecstatic that [Arthur Rizk] was down to do it and he wanted to do it. I’ve loved Arthur’s recordings forever. When we were writing this record, it wasn’t just ‘how can we make this sound mean and heavy,’ it was also ‘how can we incorporate melody in a smart way.’ We wanted to try different things out with guitars because we have three guitars in the live performance most of the time. There’s kind of like a cleaner tone behind a lot of the songs on this, which we were incorporating live. And although it’s clean, we still wanted some bite to it. We also aimed for a specific ambience, which I think we achieved. Arthur was crucial to all of that.”

I nod in agreement that Rizk is the right person for that job, and that choosing the right personnel can be crucial—sort of like making sure all of your snipers are aligned in a triangulation of fire. It is here that I finally get my first good old-fashioned “the fuck is your problem, asshole” look from the boys. So I move along to discuss their DIY touring and their goals for the future—do they plan to tour the U.S. thoroughly? What about overseas and Europe? If so, how will they leave? Will it be through Denver International Airport? The look on their faces makes it painfully clear: We’ve run out of time. So we exchange goodbyes and thank-yous and move along.

Okay, obviously Final Gasp are stonewalling on the real issues, so I decided to dig deep into their record to try to find some of the hidden meanings that surely must be there. As far as I can tell, it’s just a 12-track burner that amalgamates their influences into a massive, pensive, and dramatic whole. It’s melodic and muscular, bursting at the seams with familiar approaches that never rehash old ideas. I also hear other bands besides the ones mentioned earlier—Neurosis, Axegrinder, Second Empire Justice-era Blitz, even Sisters of Mercy. At this point I’ve listened to Mourning Moon a dozen times, mostly because it’s so well-crafted, but also because I really want to know where to find Bigfoot.

--FRED PESSARO

SWEEPING PROMISES
Out of all the options I suggested, I was equally relieved and intrigued when Sweeping Promises agreed to meet me at the Turkey’s Nest at 1 p.m. on a Thursday. Finding non-cringe places to quietly hang out in Williamsburg is hard, but their publicist requested we meet somewhere near Music Hall of Williamsburg, where Sweeping Promises would be playing later that night. I had made a list of ideas, and the Turkey’s Nest was the only true dive bar I included. It’s darkly lit and low-key, but that’s okay! It’s worth it to hear yourself think, along with the knowledge that nobody is going to walk in wearing yoga pants. Sweeping Promises, these gups are probably all right, I thought. Or they are complete maniacs who like the idea of a frozen margarita in a giant Styrofoam cup at lunchtime.

The band has been on my radar since they released their first album, Hunger for a Way Out, in 2020. They play a brand of stripped-down and extremely catchy post-punk that sounds like a ’60s television set bouncing off the walls of a nuclear bunker. The songs are urgent and antagonistic but rooted in melody, like the Ramones or Kleenex, and are highlighted by bassist and vocalist Fira Mondal’s impressive range.

“I think we want to make really negative, capital-N ‘No’ music,” bespectacled guitarist Caufield Schnug tells me while sipping a Coke. “But it also has other emotional contours to it.”

Schnug and Mondal are sitting across from me, and on my side of the table is drummer Spenser Gralla. Although the band is technically a two-piece, Gralla is a touring member. I ask how they’re feeling about this particular era in post-punk, or even guitar music in general these days. “I guess I feel like we’re speeding towards...obsolescence? Which is maybe why we’re holding on so hard,” Mondal says.

“I don’t want to be the person who’s like, ‘I only listen to synth music,’ or something,” Schnug says. “I believe in the open-endedness of guitar music.... I think as long as you’re committed to defamiliarization, finding the multicultural, multi-historical components to a thing, there’ll be emergence. There’s always work to be done. ‘Post’ is important, finding the futures of punk.”

Setting the future aside for a moment, Sweeping Promises might be the prime example of a band making it work in these times. For one thing, as much as publicists and critics always yearn to align a band with a place of origin, the trio are kind of from nowhere.

Mondal and Schnug—who are also a couple—met in Arkansas about 15 years ago and immediately started playing together. “We played for four years in Conway, Arkansas,” Schnug says. “People hated our music. And we did it nonstop and didn’t listen to anyone except ourselves because we trusted each other, and there weren’t many people who had our inclinations. So it was a bond forged in fire, and I’m really proud of it.”

They eventually moved to Boston, where they made and unmade a series of new bands. Sweeping Promises were formed in 2019, and in February 2020 they played their first show, right before the pandemic. Gralla ended up moving to Portland, Maine, and Schnug and Mondal eventually decided to quit Boston and move in with Shnug’s parents in Austin. But Hunger for a Way Out was steadily gaining attention and good reviews, and Sub Pop signed the band for a second album. Mondal and Schnug had always self-recorded and were determined to continue, but quickly realized that their current situation was not going to work.

“We had no resources or a place to record, like we literally couldn’t do it,” Schnug says. “We were recording in my parents’ bathroom—”

“—while they were working from home upstairs,” Mondal says.

“It was a room that was, like, as big as this table,” says Schnug, looking down at the wood grain in front of us. “So we looked everywhere in the world for the cheapest [option].... We were thinking of buying a high school in upstate New York—it didn’t have any heat or anything.”

“But it had a basketball court,” Mondal says.

“Yeah, we wanted to record in the basketball court,” Schnug says.

Using their Sub Pop advance, the duo found a home in Fawrence, Kansas, with a studio on the property that was originally used for painting and ceramics. Two years later, it’s been a game-changer. “Every other recording that we’ve done has been in our kitchen,” Schnug says. “We literally worked in our kitchen for 10 years.”

The resulting album, Good Living Is Coming for You, was released this past June, leading the band to the cross-American tour that’s plunked them in Brooklyn on this muggy August afternoon.

I mention how it’s interesting that, traditionally, bands would consider moving to New York or F.A. as the most practical way to enter the music industry. Maybe that’s not the case anymore as affordability moves further and further out of reach. Mondal says that eschewing that path has been better for them. “For us it all comes down to money and resources and space,” she says.

Definitely not maniacs. Cheers!

--GRACE SCOTT