The Surreal Twin-Guitar Debauchery of Cory Hanson

Cory Hanson makes beautifully puzzling music. Best known as the lead singer and guitarist of Los Angeles art rock outfit Wand since 2013, Hanson melds a love of rip-roaring American classic rock with songcraft that’s much more abstract than the average tune on your local Oldies station. His lyrics filter gnawing desires and fears through raw, impressionistic scenes, inviting listeners to find their own truths in his tangled visions. “I swallow a broken sound / That burns inside my gut / Cross-eyed, I keep falling / Laughing on my way to you,” Hanson sings on “Lucky’s Sight” from Wand’s latest full-length Laughing Matter, which reads like an ephemeral fever dream. His music is similarly slippery—one minute, throbbing art rock hypnosis devolves into sweltering prog carnage, and the next an Neil Young-esque tearjerker segues into joyful avant-pop à la Deerhunter.

Hanson’s forthcoming third solo album Western Cum is among his most surreal works yet. It pairs high-stakes tales of ghosts and murderers with Thin Lizzy-style twin guitar wizardry, and although all of Hanson’s records exude an appreciation for classic rock, you can imagine Beavis and Butthead singing these riffs. His previous solo LP, 2021’s Pale Horse Rider, was more low-key, embracing acoustic balladry and tender lyricism, and its promotion was rather unique. Hanson recorded a video series titled Limited Hangout, which included performances of Pale Horse Rider songs as well as goofy skits featuring characters like Spotify Man, Muppet Cory, an anthropomorphic keyhole, and an evil podcast host on a mission to make a country-grunge album. Hanson also asked fans to submit blooper videos with the album’s title track playing in the background for an aptly titled campaign, Fail Horse Rider. Playfulness was largely absent on Pale Horse Rider itself, but it seeped into the heady debauchery of Western Cum, which feels like a humorous wink at country western murder ballads and the whimsical imagination of hallucinatory rock records.

Western Cum opens with “Wings,” which subverts the classic cowboy revenge epic by swapping dueling buckaroos with grudge-bearing angels. “Housefly” is another amusing, dreamlike flip of the script, as an oversized insect swats a human (“Crushed against the door frame / Scabbed into the paint / Panting in the hallway / I limp over to the sink”). Then there’s “Twins,” an offbeat musing on twin biology and a brief nod to the 1988 buddy comedy film of the same name (“What if twins were two connections of a soul? / Like Arnold and DeVito / One egg with two yolks”). There are also recurring images of death, storms, and the sea, which imprint an animalistic ruthlessness on the record—accentuating the American-ness at the heart of this Skynyrd riff-peppered LP.

During a time when classic rock hardly occupies any space in the modern cultural consciousness and critics laud songwriting that vomits an artist’s inner monologues verbatim, releasing an album like Western Cum is, well, somewhat ballsy. (Sorry, I’ll see myself out. Low-hanging fruit.) But Hanson couldn’t imagine altering his creative process just to fit in with passing trends.

“I feel like if there’s ever gonna be a point where the musical zeitgeist is doing something that I’m doing, it’ll be a catchup thing,” Hanson says. “They’ll be like, ‘Oh, there’s this guy making weird Southern rock, science fiction music, and that has cultural currency now’ … Whether it’s these more melancholic, slower ballad-y songs that I do—that I think are the thing that I’m really good at—or these more jubilant, upbeat guitar pieces, my whole thing is trying to be as honest as I can without being too direct. I like to write music that has a more complex truth, because I think that’s just the nature of truth, if that’s even a thing.”

It also feels noteworthy to give an album such a brazen title in a time when conservatives are banning books nationwide and declaring any outward display of sexuality as depraved, while simultaneously obsessing over the genitalia of trans people and yelling at Wendy’s cashiers that the M&M’s mascots aren’t sexy enough anymore. Western Cum is not shocking or explicit in any way—save for the one lyric about cocaine taped to someone’s balls on “Ghost Ship,” which is pretty funny and harmless—but due to today’s constant churn of media fear-mongering, it sometimes feels like we’re one more pseudo-controversial pop song away from a repeat of the 1985 “porn-rock” hearings.

“I think there’s a lot of internet swarm in [this record], thinking about things in terms of these isolated cells of people that are proliferating information on the internet—like this feedback loop of obsession,” Hanson says. “It makes the world feel less sane. It makes it feel like groups of people are going completely out of their minds, nuclear—not even because of something that’s happening in their immediate world, but because of something that’s incredibly visible on the internet.”

Hanson did consider the risk that listeners might discount Western Cum just because of its title. After all, every few months, someone goes viral on Music Twitter for saying they can’t muster the urge to listen to a band named King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard—which, fair enough, I guess. But ultimately, Hanson felt like the title captured the ethos of the record—a guns-blazing, cowboy boot-stomping album of American rock ‘n’ roll pageantry.

“I definitely spent a lot of time wondering whether it was a good or horrible idea to name the record Western Cum, and the jury’s still out, deliberating. But I do like the title a lot, and I stand by my decision to call it that. It thematically ties the record together for me, in terms of the lyrical content, in terms of the guitar, this wellspring of libidinal, Hendrix—the thing the guitar does or signifies. It’s kind of a fucking weird phallic thing. And the cum thing, I was thinking a lot about origin while making the record, which, in a lot of ways, it’s about American origin, making an American electric guitar record … I didn’t want to call it Western Seed or Western Egg or something. I thought it should be something that feels more dismissable or grotesque, because it complicates it in an interesting way, and it makes me feel like there’s something at stake. People could just write this off and say, ‘This guy’s making a record about cum. I don’t want to hear a record about cum.’”

Speaking of origin, this record began a few years ago with Hanson’s search for an amplifier that complemented his style of guitar playing—which is, at once, emotionally attuned, painterly and flamethrower-like. Hanson’s heartfelt shredding led John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers to name him as one of his favorite contemporary guitarists and led Wand to open for avant-pop greats Stereolab in 2019. Hanson eventually found the spiritual companion he was looking for, but it was a rescue amp of sorts—presumably spared in a fire.

“I’ve used lots of amplifiers and have settled on some that are just really loud, but I hadn’t found one that spoke to me,” Hanson says. “I found this old Fender amp with a bunch of burns and smoke damage on it, and I just really liked the sound of it … Sometimes you’ll get a guitar and you run it through a really nice amp, and it won’t do anything. There’s no spark. And then sometimes, you get the right guitar and the right amp, and it just opens up this whole world of sound, and the amp will start interacting with the guitar, the guitar will start interacting with the amp, and I’m emotionally responding to what’s happening. I think the record is pretty much about that feeling.”

Western Cum feels like you’re being body slammed by guitars, getting tucked into bed and kissed on the forehead by guitars, getting cigarette smoke blown in your face by guitars. The record incorporates acoustic and steel guitars, but it gets its tantalizing might from the electric licks and riffs, firing like a motorcycle engine and acting as a rowdy, rootin’-tootin’ counterpoint to Hanson’s soft, poignant vocals. In some ways, the 10-minute “Driving Through Heaven” feels like the album’s centerpiece, marked by supercharged guitar solos that reek with so much gut-busting emotion, it feels like your stereo speakers might begin to levitate. There’s an irresistible verve in Hanson’s playing, from the rickety squawks of “Horsebait Sabotage” to the tormented cries of “Twins,” so it’s no surprise that this record brought back memories of his early days with the instrument.

“When I was a kid, I had a shitty amp and an okay guitar, and I was just playing all day and all night in my room by myself, just feeding off of this thing—this relationship,” Hanson recalls. “It was affirming a lot of things when I was 13 or 14 and helping me process a lot of things that were very difficult. There’s no philosophy you can adopt as a 14-year-old that will get you safely through puberty and high school and all that shit without having some kind of emotional scars, but guitar was very therapeutic for me.”

Hanson’s recent stint in a ZZ Top cover band—complete with foot-long, fake beards—is another manifestation of this enduring childlike passion, as well as his burning desire to open for Guns N’ Roses. “My lines are all open—Axl, Duff, Slash, I’m waiting,” Hanson says. “Maybe someone will see this. I need to amplify my quest to open for Guns N’ Roses because it would be really fucking sick… There’s one band called Vintage Trouble that I’ve seen open for AC/DC, The Who, Def Leppard, ZZ Top. They have Mötley Crüe’s manager, which is maybe what I need to do—just get Mötley Crüe’s manager. But Vintage Trouble opens for every classic rock band in Los Angeles, and I want to be that band. I think Vintage Trouble is old news. Western Cum is fresh, current.”

While Western Cum contains the filthy, sweat-dripping solos of Southern rock titans like ZZ Top and cock rock (no pun intended) giants like Van Halen, the album’s folky structures and artful guitar noodling also evokes the cosmic Americana of William Tyler and Steve Gunn. As Wand fans have grown accustomed to, this album showcases Hanson’s versatility, packing pop melodicism and prog eccentricities alongside rock ‘n’ roll’s bombastic joy and folk’s familiar warmth. But Hanson tries not to approach albums as cynical genre exercises—rather, he uses different styles to try to take risks and push ideas and sounds further.

“There’s this thing about songwriting that’s like, ‘You gotta play cowboy chords. You gotta keep your hand up here—never go down here—and it has to be simple,’” Hanson says. “‘You have to have an acoustic guitar. You have to be at the piano.’ And this was like, ‘No, let’s put on a fucking electric guitar. Let’s make this all really saturated and harmonically dense.’ [In terms of] the depth of the songwriting, there’s places you can go that are even deeper there. It doesn’t have to be all pin-drop, sad songs or whatever. It can be fireworks going off in a house.”

This album’s beaming guitar work—flaming like the gnarliest skull tattoo of any biker’s bicep you’ve ever seen—certainly holds up to that image. Western Cum, along with Smokey Robinson’s horndog opus Gasms, may go down as one of the more eye-catching album titles you’ll see this year. But, all jokes aside, it’s another artistically rich LP from one of the most compelling singer/songwriters working today.

Western Cum is out on June 23 via Drag City. Purchase the album here.

Lizzie Manno is a former Paste editor, with bylines at Stereogum, Pitchfork, SPIN, Billboard, Flood Magazine, The Recording Academy and Cleveland Scene. Follow her on Twitter @LizzieManno.