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.