ALBUM REVIEW: A Call To The Void – Hot Milk
EPs are a lot like university; you stumble through your studies, party through the nights, and miss your mum’s hot dinners, all in honour of finding your feet and discovering who you are. Debut albums are your graduation ceremony; you’ve got the degree, you’ve got an identity, and now it’s time to make something of yourself. With a trilogy of EPs under their belt, A Call To The Void is both the closing of one door and the opening of a much bigger one for Manchester polymaths HOT MILK.
If you’ve lumped HOT MILK into your sugar-sweet pop-punk coffee, A Call To The Void will have you changing your drink of choice. Sure, there’s plenty of alt-rock ragers you’ve come to love from co-vocalists and songwriters Han Mee and Jim Shaw. Opening duo Welcome To The… and Horror Show eases you in, combining surround sound cinematics and ghostly harmonies with an industrial smorgasbord of sounds so massive in size you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re running a gauntlet with Goliath.
Playing it safe though is something HOT MILK just don’t do. Bloodstream embraces their flirtation with synth-pop, before Zoned Out zones in to clubs across the country, with thumping bass, spirited synths, and the kind of chorus that’ll kick out of the pit and cause stadium-sized sing-alongs. Beyond that, bubbling synths send acoustic-popper Breathing Underwater out of Alice Cooper’s Pool House and into the stratosphere, whilst the glimmering, Julian Comeau of LOVELESS-featuring Amphetamine pivots Mee and Shaw for careers as songwriters for superstars.
A Call To The Void is a joyous album to listen to on the surface, however cut open the lyrics and look under their skin and you’ll find sugar-coated nihilism and self-loathing. The infectiously indulgent, contagious chemistry that sparks off like fireworks into the night of Mee and Shaw’s dual vocals — whether they’re soaring to the skies with cleans, exorcising their demons with screams, or ripping into riffs with raps — injects every lyric into your veins with the intensity of ecstasy.
The blazing violence with which Shaw screams “Over your dead body / You’re the messiah of lies / Right from the bible of the antichrist” on Over Your Dead Body leaves scars on your mind; the echoing, synth-driven deadpan Mee delivers on Migraine as she confesses “I don’t want to keep living / So I just keep living it up” opens your eyes to rock and roll’s less glamorous side; and the honey-dripping, heartstring-pulling dual harmonies of Breathing Underwater as the pair sing “I can’t believe I became the disease / And the snakes that sing are learning to scream in my dreams that they drag through the dirt now I’m painted in hurt” will have you feeling every emotion in the book.
Whether HOT MILK are pumping out mosh pit ragers (Party On My Deathbed, Over Your Dead Body), stadium-sized bangers (Bloodstream, Zoned Out), or pop songs that prove they’re once-in-a-generation songwriters, one thing’s clear: if A Call To The Void was their dissertation, they just passed with first class honours.
Rating: 9/10
A Call To The Void is set for release on August 25th via Music For Nations.
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