Hot Mulligan: Why You SHOULD Watch
They say that there is simply no substitute for hard work. Some bands come right out of the gate and strike lucky early on, picking up clout via social media because they just so happen to be in the right place at the right time and then there are some who graft away for years patiently waiting for their opportunity to come and grabbing at it with both hands. HOT MULLIGAN falls into the latter category.
Since their formation nearly a decade before the boys from Michigan have been crafting their sound a putting in more than their fair share of hard graft. Reaping a decent amount of success and notoriety in the scene as a result. However, when they dropped their superb sophomore full-length album, You’ll Be Fine back in 2022 things felt very different. The momentum picked up and the band have had their pedal to the metal ever since to keep things going, enjoying the ascension that they have worked so hard for. Fast forward three years and the band have just released their third album Why Would I Watch, and look set to keep the good times rolling. We managed to catch up with vocalist and founding member Nathan ‘Tades’ Sanville during a rare bit of downtime for the band to get his thoughts on how things have taken off for the band.
“We’ve always toured in this stupid, suicidal way where we are always out on the road,” explains Tades. “I got fired from so many jobs doing this.” This shows the kind of mindset that is so integral to the band and the amount of sacrifice that the group has made as a collective to change the same seminal goal. Once gain highlighting that HOT MULLIGAN aren’t just a fly by night band, but the culmination of hard work over a prolonged period.
With that being said, the band have never seemed to let their sense of humour and light- heartedness wain throughout it all. A perfect example of this is the use of laughably long, often nonsensical song titles but as Tade explains “some of the titles are from inside jokes from tour and the studio, we collect them for the names of demos and some just stick.” For example, the title No Shoes in the Coffee Shop (Or Socks) comes from a moment on tour. “Chris [Freeman, guitars] went to get coffee one day and went shoeless. He wandered in like some kind of creature. We thought it was terrible, so we named a song after it,” laughs Tade.
The writing process for the band has remained the same throughout their career. The members each have their own ideas that they send to each other that they can build from, but the main meat of what makes up an album is written the old-fashioned way, in the band’s practice space. “There were a couple of days in the studio when our producer was out, and we all gathered in the recording room and had everything plugged in. We came up with three ideas that ended up being added to the album.” It’s that kind of tuned-in, shared mentality that has served the band so well and has helped to that their material from strength to strength, album by album.
With the last few ears being so hectic the band are taking some time to pump the brakes slightly. This doesn’t mean they are resting on their laurels by any extent, rather they are planning things in a more conservative manor. “As it stands, we’ll be heading back to the UK in the fall, then pretty much sticking to the US for a bit,” explains Tade. “Next year is pretty open for us as it stands, and I would like to see some more places. Some of the roads less travelled.”
With HOT MULLIGAN gaining momentum the way they have been over the past few years and their strongest material to date in the bank it seems as though there is no stopping them. The band may have a slightly more modest touring schedule coming up for the next year or so, but it seems as though they are itching to get themselves further out into the world and exploring nee territories as soon as they possibly can.
Watch this space.
Why Would I Watch is out now via Wax Bodega.
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