Liquid Mike Makes Music For Airports

If Brian Eno made music for airports, hubs of interconnectivity and sterile aesthetics, then Liquid Mike also makes music for airports, bastions of congestion, chaos, and urgency. The Marquette, Michigan band, led by frontman Mike Maple, is known for their prolificacy and fuzzed-out indie rock songs, a tidy analog for airport-as-stress-factory. Liquid Mike’s songs are short, frenetic, and high-wired, apt metaphors for the transience of constant travel. Breakthrough records like 2023’s S/T and 2024’s Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot demonstrated the band’s capabilities for writing memorable choruses and pithy one-liners, and both records earned them increasingly bigger waves of new fans. Hell Is an Airport, their sixth LP, is fittingly brief, hook-heavy, and, like its namesake, buzzing with life, from the opening onslaught of “Instantly Wasted” to the working-class woes fueling “Crop Circles.”

When I ask Maple, who joins me for a conversation over Zoom from his home in Marquette, why he gravitates toward brevity to begin with, his answer is fittingly succinct: “I feel like I don’t need a second verse.” Short songs are part and parcel of Liquid Mike’s ethos, and that’s because he finds it more impactful to get an idea in and out before a listener is even able to process how magically catchy it is. “I love making a little nugget of a song or statement,” he says. “Those are my favorite songs to find.” In fact, Maple wants to make the songs even shorter down the road, just to keep listeners on their toes, never knowing what to expect. He’s already plotting out the next album: a bunch of ridiculously short songs and one five- or eight-minute finale. “That’s, like, my dream,” he says.

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Maybe Maple’s penchant for concision has to do with the fact that he’s not used to waiting. Instant gratification is how his project has largely operated, at least up until recently. Hell Is an Airport marks the longest promotion cycle in his career, and, as a result, the longest he’s ever had to wait for one of his albums to come out. “Every time we finished an album before, it was out in three weeks,” he explains. He’s been sitting on these new songs since he wrapped up the recording process in February, and now that Liquid Mike has slowly accumulated a devoted following, patience has become a major aspect of his now-full-time career as a musician.

A central component of the narrative initially surrounding his music was his role as a post office employee. Since the band has accrued more exposure, he quit his postal service job and is now dedicating more time than ever to making music. Still, leaving that line of work has its drawbacks for Maple. “The post office gig was nice because you were seeing snapshots of people’s lives,” he says. “Sometimes you’re out on your own, but you keep your eyes open, and you hear and see things that stick with you, so that was easy to write from.” But Maple has been earning some supplementary income as a mover and as a substitute teacher, and the latter has lent itself well to artistic inspiration. “They have interesting viewpoints on things and just say crazy stuff,” he says of his students.

Ultimately, the throughline is that the wider world serves as Maple’s artistic catalyst—ironic, considering that Marquette is notably isolated from any major city. Detroit, the biggest city in the state, for instance, takes over six-and-a-half hours to reach by car. But Marquette, located in the Upper Peninsula, holds its own locus of activity, both in terms of a DIY indie rock scene and slice-of-life tales that brim with universal resonance. On “AT&T,” Maple channels his inner Mark Hoppus to document the boredom and mundanity of a life spent perpetually indoors and losing your mind. “How the days move slow / When they’re spent alone,” he sings, stretching out the final word of each line to further hammer home the ennui. “Gather the things you broke in half / Save it together, make it last,” goes the indelible opening line of power-pop-punk anthem “Groucho Marx.” “It’s all I can do when I wake up / My body hates me for it,” he sings of the frustrations of a sleepless night.

Those myriad frustrations, which creep up on you during banal, everyday moments, are primarily what Maple wrestles with on Hell Is an Airport. It translates in the gnarly guitars and boisterous hooks, the shout-along nature of Maple’s delivery and the general malaise of the lyrics. “I don’t think this is a sad album at all, but it’s a frustrated one about feeling stuck,” he says. That idea chiefly came to fruition when he kept finding himself between tour legs at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, a place he describes as a nexus of waiting lines with no endpoints. “Back in Hell,” he’d jokingly think to himself whenever he returned. That cyclical experience made him think about other facets of his life, such as quitting his job and music taking its place.

“I had been thinking about quitting the [postal] job for a while, and that brought on a lot of anxiety,” he says. “I don’t feel like [music is] a job at all yet, but it definitely feels different now that people are excited for it, not in a bad way, just in a different way.” A rapid succession of lifestyle changes brought about various frustrations and anxieties. “I think that’s why it’s called Hell Is an Airport. It’s not really about Hell or about an airport, but it’s an abstract feeling about how I was feeling at the time, stuck in one spot, waiting for the next thing.”

With the analogies about airports and waiting lingering at the front of my mind, I describe the scene in The Fairly Odd Parents in which the characters ride an endless escalator to a purported amusement park, only to discover that the escalator itself is the ride. In the context of an airport, though, Maple admits that it’s his favorite part, namely its x-axis counterpart: the moving walkway. “It’s like a horizontal escalator that makes you walk fast,” he says. “That was probably the only good thing about that airport.”

Hell Is an Airport abides by the charming messiness Liquid Mike has come to be known for, the guitars and drums at once murky and punchy, as if Maple accidentally stumbled upon a great song in real time and was lucky enough to capture it. Across its 14 bite-sized tracks, it’s readily apparent that it was no accident. Maple is just a gifted craftsman, even if he’s loath to admit as much himself. Regardless, he’s content to rely on his own intuition. “We write the songs, we record, and we mix, and we master them, and we do all the art, and we press the record ourselves,” he says. “That is always a big point of pride for me.”

But he imagines the next step for Liquid Mike could be recording in a proper studio, alongside a professional mixing engineer and producer. “I am curious about getting other people and recording in a proper studio,” he says. “Maybe that’ll happen next time. I think that would be a fun direction to go with this band, so I’m leaning toward that.” For now, though, Liquid Mike is a through-and-through DIY endeavor. Even if they do eventually widen the creative net, the band will stay true to a handful of tenets: they don’t need extended outros; they don’t need second verses, and, most importantly, to quote Maple himself, “we don’t need bullshit.”

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.
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Liquid Mike Makes Music For Airports

Ringleader Mike Maple discusses the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, quitting his job as a postal worker, and the Marquette, Michigan band’s sixth album, Hell Is an Airport.