Hot Mulligan Trudge Through the Wreckage

Much of Hot Mulligan’s music wrestles with the everyday fears of human existence, how being alive comes with numerous neuroses that feed on the general malaise of the world we inhabit. Throughlines such as grief, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and suicidal ideation permeate their songs like pollen in springtime. Those themes are salient as ever on The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still, the Lansing, Michigan band’s fourth album. Halfway through its runtime, lead vocalist Nathan “Tades” Sanville mourns the death of a loved one. “Car parts littering the front lawn of the house you raised me in back in high school / The town falls apart, there’s nothing left familiar / Everything that meant anything broken down or it died,” goes its bridge, Sanville trading lines with Hot Mulligan’s other core songwriter, rhythm guitarist and co-vocalist Chris Freeman. Together, they paint a portrait of a hometown in ruins, a family member laid to rest, and harrowing regrets that leave our narrator with “shame dripping out of my skin.” Oh, and by the way, the name of this song is “Monica Lewinskibidi.”

How about a highlight reel of some of my favorite song titles on the new Hot Mulligan record? Sure: “Let Me See Your Mounts”; “It Smells Like Fudge Axe in Here”; and, a feat in phonetic gymnastics, “Cream of Wheat of Feet Naw Cream of (feat).” In the five-piece’s nascent EP days, the band members would type haphazard things into their phones with AutoCorrect on, which resulted in nonsensical, random words strung together. That’s not their methodology anymore. Now, it’s just whoever has the best reference to an inside joke or “whoever says something really fucking dumb first,” Sanville tells me on a Zoom call. “It’s all word vomit.” Don’t think of it as a conscious effort to compartmentalize the latent sorrow of Sanville’s and Freeman’s lyrics. The shit-posty nature of their naming process is actually something like an unorthodox form of confrontation, and humor is their weapon.

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“I feel like you hit that hump where it’s so ridiculously bad that it’s funny, and it’s hard to meet the realities and horrors of being alive without humor,” he says. “It’s not like I’m making this funny so it doesn’t hurt so bad. It’s like the world and everyone is so awful that it’s funny now.” The lovably bonkers titles have become a staple of the emo group, and it’s one that Sanville and his bandmates stand by: “Very rarely do we attach [the title] to what the song is about, because the songs are all bummers, you know?” This is ultimately the central concern of Hot Mulligan: the tragicomic essence of day-to-day living.

If the song titles are often disconnected from their lyrical bent, then it comes as a coincidence that the name of the album is relatively true to its subject matter. “I’m a very anxious person, so I’m afraid of everything,” Sanville says. “I used to drink a lot in order to quell that. It turned the theme of the album into the fear that I feel so often and my inability to self-medicate because I don’t like who I am when I’m drunk. So the sound a body makes when it’s still is, you know, fast-beating heart, breath that you can’t quite control, the fucking little signs of anxiety. It’s at face value. I’m no artist.” Across its 16 tracks, Sanville and Freeman posit on The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still that, yes, sobriety is freeing and necessary. When it’s woven into an album’s promotional narrative, it’s often framed as a period of enlightenment for the artist, in which everything comes into view clearer than before. But rarely do such narratives admit that, frankly, it can also be pretty damn scary. Facing the world day in and day out with nothing to dull your senses is no small task. When your breath catches in your lungs and your heartbeat pounds in your chest, substances offer themselves up as a nefarious balm, however harmful they are in the long term.

“And a Big Load,” the record’s lead single, is “angled toward fucking nose drugs stuff,” as Freeman has informed Sanville, and it makes for a solid example of what Sanville describes as The Sound a Body Makes’ overarching thesis statement: “This sucks, and without these things, everything is scary.” Over pingponging pop-punk guitars and Brandon Blakeley’s propelling drumbeat, Freeman reckons with his addictive tendencies and their detrimental consequences: “I’m laying down to rest / By myself in bed, but I won’t wake up / So I’ve been trying to quit.” On “Carbon Monoxide Hotel” Sanville explores the pains of recalling last night’s mistakes in his standard half-screamed-half-sung delivery. “Only proof is I woke up / Displaced from where I thought I would be,” he yells, his vocal cords palpably raw and shredded. Songs like these are a way for him to reflect on “the indifference that I would feel before I would get blackout drunk because it’s like, well, I won’t remember it anyway,” he says. “So why should I give a fuck?”

But what’s past is past; Hot Mulligan clearly do give a fuck, at least enough to write killer songs about said indifference as earnestly as possible, so much so that Sanville feels like the band’s creative process itself is easier than it’s ever been. They recorded The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still over three sessions at the Barber Shop Studios in New Jersey in between various breaks from their own headlining tour for 2023’s Why Would I Watch and arena stops opening for Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World. The making of their 2020 breakthrough LP, you’ll be fine, was a notoriously grueling endeavor, given that they chipped away at it for over a month straight. In other words, they were not fine. “We just spent way too much time in the studio, and it turned into purgatory, and it felt insane,” Sanville remembers. This time around, he “wasn’t afraid of sunlight.”

The occasional snippet of joy exists within the music itself, too. If you completely disregard the lyrics about drinking yourself into an amnesiac stupor, then the Glocca Morra-coded anthem “Island in the Sun,” featuring Free Throw’s Cory Castro, resembles something as fun and simple as a good time with friends. It also helps that, as you may have surmised from the title, the band enlisted one of their closest friends and peers to lay down guest vocals. Hot Mulligan and Free Throw are kindred spirits, and Sanville is quick to sing the latter’s praises. “We’re just fucking homies dude, like my wife does merch for them, so I essentially tour with them all the time, like we’ve known them fucking forever, and I’ve done a couple of Free Throw features now,” he says. “So it only seems natural then that we have Cory pop in and do some Hot Mulligan shit with us. Free Throw is my favorite band, so it’s the only voice that I want in our shit that isn’t mine or Chris’. There’s no Hot Mulligan without Free Throw.”

Although Sanville is more than happy to compliment his contemporaries, he finds it difficult to impress himself. When I press him to name something that he’s proud of with The Sound a Body Makes, he mentions the last song on its tracklist, “My Dad Told Me to Write a Nice One for Nana So This Is It.” “At some point,” he elaborates, “I started writing the little acoustic songs like ‘Betty’ and ‘Heem Wasn’t There,’ and I don’t particularly do a good job playing them, but I’m proud to release them. I’m not a very competent musician. I’m a much better writer. The last one, the song that my dad told me to write for my nana, I’m happy with that because when I play it right, it sounds really pretty.” And it does sound pretty. It’s a tender ode that comes as a sharp departure from all the chaotic screaming and rowdy pop-punk that precedes it. “There’s no replacement I could ever choose / I sing your praise, it’s the least that I could do,” he sings toward its end, capturing one of the few moments on the record where everything is truly still—where Hot Mulligan interprets the stillness not as a sputtering heartbeat, not as shaky, rattled breaths, but as serenity. Once you come to terms with the pain, the mistakes, and the regrets, you can find something like peace.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.

Hot Mulligan Trudge Through the Wreckage

The Michigan emo band’s fourth album is, of course, extremely bleak, but The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still faces the detritus of addiction head-on. Lead vocalist Nathan “Tades” Sanville reflects on his band’s latest LP.