Hunx and His Punx Walked Out On the World and Lived to Tell the Tale

If there was ever going to be an occasion for Hunx and His Punx—a band of artists and best friends, once described by their founder as “a girl group fronted by a gay guy who’s trying to sound like a girl”—to reunite after a 5-year hiatus, it may as well have been for a “terrible” set for legendary filmmaker John Waters’ birthday party in 2019. Seth Bogart, the aforementioned bandleader and noted fine artist in his off-time, and Shannon Shaw, also known for her work with her band Shannon & the Clams, come together now to set the scene for me: having taken a lengthy break from playing after an exhausting tour in Japan half-a-decade prior to this party, Bogart, Shaw, and their bandmate Erin Emslie figured it would be a cinch to reunite at the Pope of Trash’s request. What could go wrong?

Bogart, who started the group almost 20 years ago, answers that question for me once prompted. “Some fan gave me a joint that was psychotic,” he laughs, rubbing a hand against his face, “and then I was [on stage, complaining] like, ‘Stop playing so faaaaaast,’ and then I just talked at the crowd for an hour.”

“I think you laid down,” Shaw adds, seated beside him on a couch somewhere in Los Angeles, ahead of a rehearsal for their tour later that afternoon. “You brought a chair onto the stage.”

He smiles, as if just remembering, letting his voice grow gruffer as he impersonates himself high and on a rampage in front of the partygoers: “That’s when I was like, ‘Maybe this was a bad idea!’ But also, it was probably funny.”

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“It was so funny,” Shaw assures him. “I think our worst shows are also our best shows a lot of the time. There’s only been two times where we played a show and it didn’t go as planned, but the crowd completely rejected it.” She shrugs. “We still had fun.”

The reasons for Hunx and His Punx reuniting, as far as musical projects go, are pretty simple: the trio, between responsibilities for their other artistic endeavors, are just friends who love playing off-the-wall, irreverent pop songs together. When promoting the first Hunx album, Gay Singles, in 2011, Bogart’s explanation for starting a “teenage, ‘60s-themed gay group” was equally as simple: “I just like writing music like that, and I like writing sad love songs that are not that serious.” Even if the drive to create meant an opportunity to let loose and pay tribute to the music the band loved, it made sense that Bogart would want to take an extended break after a spitfire run of three albums—Gay Singles, Too Young To Be in Love, and Street Punk—in three years. Yet, after that ill-fated return to the stage in 2019 and plans to make a follow-up to 2013’s Street Punk that followed it, a tragic series of events caused these plans to screech to a halt several times over the following five years.

First, the pandemic struck, putting all music-making on hold for a time. Then, Shaw’s fiancé tragically died in a car accident, her grief over which she went on to explore on the Clams’ last album, The Moon is in the Wrong Place. This, too, understandably took precedence over the return to Hunx for an extended period. Finally, right when it seemed like album rollout plans were back on track earlier this year, Bogart’s home was impacted by the Altadena fires, leaving the basement in which about half of the new album was recorded contaminated with ash and toxic smoke damage. The irony of this all, where the relatively frivolous and light-hearted music kept taking hits from unimaginable loss, reshaping its makers’ lives, is not lost on the band.

The resulting album, Walk Out On This World, takes a slightly different shape than any other Hunx release. Whereas Street Punk took about a week to write and record, in Bogart’s estimation, its follow-up was forced to develop slowly “over three or four years and probably 10 different sessions.” He notes that the death of Shaw’s fiancé, in particular, “changed the record from being this goofy thing to something with more serious subject matter, because I don’t think Shannon was capable of writing songs that weren’t about what had happened.” She agrees: “No, definitely not.”

“The world also got so dark and fucked up,” he continues. “I mean, it always was, but I think we’re seeing it so much more now. Those events all made the record click into what it is. When Shannon wrote the song ‘Walk Out On This World,’ I remember thinking it just felt so reflective of the time. There was no way to write these fun songs without talking about death and grief and the world ending, because it’s just the time we live in.”

I choose not to share this with the band, but maybe four hours earlier on the day we speak, that title track, which closes the record, made me start crying as I relistened to the full album on a flight back home to New York from the Pacific Northwest. If you had told me when I was in high school, listening to those first three albums, that I would someday tear up listening to a Hunx and His Punx album of all things, I would not have believed you. Blame it on the strange emotional imbalance that strikes certain people at higher altitudes, but flying over such a wide stretch of the states amid such darkness on either end of my flight—not only in terms of climate-related disasters like the one that damaged Bogart’s home, but the escalated, active displacement and mistreatment of community members in both mine and the Punx’s cities on opposite coasts in recent weeks—I let myself fold.

“My love is gone, this life’s not fair,” Shaw sings over the song’s jaunty marching beat as I remained suspended and lost three hours, “But right on time, you float into my mind and say / ‘Oh, what a waste that would be, / I hope to watch you grow into a tree.’” She doesn’t fully unleash her signature, gravelly howl here as she does earlier in the tracklist, but this makes its restrained, downbeat sweetness all the richer.

As the album’s writing process was finally able to kick into full gear, Shaw moved down the coast of California to Los Angeles to be with her bandmates. She remembers the burn-it-all-down stomp of “Grab Yr Pearls” and the thrashing surf-adjacent workout “Bad Thoughts” as songs that also ended up being instructional to the balance the band needed to maintain between the silly and the serious. “I feel like, in the past, the band was really wild and political just by being explicitly queer and crazy,” Bogart says. “We didn’t have to go out of our way with it, because I feel like we were political just existing in this world that was not that welcoming to what we are. Now, I can write some songs that are just silly, but I can’t exist in this world without kind of reflecting on how bad things are. So, I think we tried to make a record that can be serious, but it’s still fun to listen to.”

It’s true that those worried about the record eschewing the winking sense of humor so prevalent on past Hunx releases have nothing to fear. Songs like single “Wild Boys” recall the more salacious moments of the group’s back catalog, taking a stab at writing a Brill Building-style ode to a boy who (among other deadly sins) is “never on time” and landing somewhere between the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” and the Shangri-Las “Give Him a Great Big Kiss.” Elsewhere, the band builds out its own semi-fictional lore with tracks like the rollicking “Top of the Punks,” which recounts “Hunx” being hassled by fans all over town—something he couldn’t have foreseen when he signed “the contract” when he was “only 14.” Their collective tongue remains firmly planted in cheek, and it’s for the better.

While thinking of another ‘60s garage rock reference point, I kept returning to tracks like the Seeds’ “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,” in which almost every line delivery is followed by an outsized wail. Perhaps this is what even the kitschiest of hits from the decade (and the tracks on Walk Out On This World) do so well: blowing frustration of all kinds up into their most dramatic, emotional form, allowing even the most unimaginable pain to emerge as something any listener can tap into. “Something I really like about girl group music and punk music is that people used the voice to emote whatever was going on in their world,” says Shaw, who possesses one of the great, distinctive voices you can currently find on record. “Whereas I can’t say there’s a lot of modern music where the voice is an instrument and it feels like you’re hearing true emotion coming through and explaining the story.”

I think now about the records of that time period which I felt most drawn to as a weird teenager, who then felt drawn to Hunx as a project because it synthesized all of those highly specific cultural artifacts I cherished and it seemed no one I knew cared about, and it’s so clear to me how they took these very real shared agonies and elevated them to the loftiest of heights within a gorgeous relic of a pop song. Shaw also cites a clear album highlight, the swooning “Bad Boys,” which she calls “very real to all of us and our experience being musicians,” as key to realizing their own power to achieve that same evocative synthesis: where a call-and-response chorus beneath Shaw’s stirring lead vocal can contain all the regret a body can hold and “battle the dark” with its power.

In Shaw’s estimation, having more time to work on the record in fits and starts was a blessing in disguise, as it allowed them to cut any of the “fluff,” as she calls it, that might have remained among earlier versions of the songs. “I think my personal best songs are coming from a true experience,” she says, “and the ones that weren’t like that got the boot as soon as we started living through some new horrendous shit. That made room for writing things that made a lot more sense.” Perhaps Bogart sums up both the friendship between the band members and the cohesive record that’s come out of their strengthened bond, renewed and restored by their shared tragedy, best: “If we’re not crying, we’re laughing.”

The laughs seem to outnumber the tears by the time the title track comes to a close, even if the record leaves us with more questions than it does answers. It’s at this point during my last listen, before I speak to the band on that plane, that I realize I’ve been approaching it all wrong—using my music critic brain to wonder how a band like this, so purposely fixated on a specific moment in music, would evolve to meet the harsh reality of our current world. Instead, it hits me that, like the trashy pop culture the band and I both came to adore, Hunx and His Punx can serve as a refuge as much as they can a confrontational bastion. It’s not quite three friends thrown together to play, but an alien planet not of our own world: a home for freaks, colored like candy and filled with razor blades, where we dance until we fall back to Earth and face another day.

Now that the band is getting set to go on the road for the first time in years, bringing that extraterrestrial experience across the country, I ask Bogart what fans can expect from another great Hunx and His Punx tour. He takes on a considerate posture, before musing, “I think that we’re gonna have a lot of wigs, and the instruments will have wigs. We’re gonna have pink instruments. I just want people to have a space to come be freaks and dance. I’m scared, because I feel like a grandma, but I think it’ll be really fun. This year has been hard, so I think it hopefully will be a good break from all that.”

“I find performing cathartic,” Shaw nods, turning to her friend, with whom she’s weathered some of her darkest days and written some of her most joyous songs—sometimes back-to-back. “The question is: Do you, though?”

“Usually!” Bogart responds, flashing back to the last time the band tried to mount a comeback, earnestly throwing themselves into the arms of a crowd looking to go out in a blaze at a legend’s 73rd birthday party, and he laughs. “Unless I smoke a random joint from a fan, and then the world’s ending in my mind.”

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.

Hunx and His Punx Walked Out On the World and Lived to Tell the Tale

Like the trashy pop culture the band came to adore, Hunx and His Punx’s music is an alien planet not of our own world: a home for freaks, colored like candy and filled with razor blades, where we dance until we fall back to Earth and face another day.