As far as indie rock origin stories go, “mailman moonlighting as a rock star gets word-of-mouth breakthrough, no label needed” is about as cool as it gets. Mike Maple started driving for USPS in 2020, shortly before his band Liquid Mike released its first two albums. Since then, the prolific group has put out a record a year of high-octane garage rock, drawing in a cult fanbase: Its 2023 album S/T struck a nerve on Bandcamp and Twitter, despite having almost no formal promotion; then, 2024’s Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot earned the group critical buzz and support slots with bands like Descendants, Joyce Manor, and Militarie Gun.
Like other Midwest rockers before them—The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and Guided By Voices all come to mind—Liquid Mike like their runtimes short, their guitars loud, and their hooks easy to sing along to no matter how many beers you’ve had. The band’s first five albums were mostly inspired by Maple’s time driving the mail truck around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the small-town shenanigans he and his friends got up to off the clock. Their discography is filled with “get out of this town” anthems—but on their sixth album, Hell Is an Airport, Liquid Mike asks what happens when a hometown hero’s journey takes him outside of his familiar surroundings.
A lot of what happens, it turns out, is more of the same. Most of these songs see Maple in head-on collision with the realization that the ennui of his home life won’t disappear once he hits the road. “What are you running from?/A middle-aged Houdini/Locked ice box/Works hard to take it easy,” Maple sings on “Grand Am,” pondering the hours he spent at previous dead-end jobs—now that his dream job has become his day job, was the less predictable path worth it? “AT&T” features some subtle record scratching underneath its shimmery guitar progression, as Maple drags out the line, “How the days move slow” in a way that could apply both to the hurry-up-and-wait of his life as a touring musician, or the grind that preceded it when this kind of success was just a daydream.
Maple’s fears of becoming an “out-of-touch out-of-towner” bubble to the surface of the speedy and metallic “Double Dutch,” though oftentimes Hell Is an Airport sees Maple and his band leaving town only to discover that the rest of the country embodies the same monotony they’ve been trying to escape. Abandoned malls, endless highways, and dead-eyed service workers are reminders of alienation on all fronts. Hell Is an Airport soundtracks industrial wastelands and suburban sprawl with wiry power-pop, crunched-up grunge-gaze, and even the occasional coughing fit of stoner metal.
A strain of nihilism runs through all Liquid Mike albums, but Hell Is an Airport is perhaps the band’s darkest. Its most sobering moments, though, are also some of its most raucous—because sometimes, it’s just plain fun to hear Mike Maple call himself a “prick” or an “evil bastard” over a steady shred and some rapid-fire drum fills. “You took his brother’s name/He died when you were born/And you will die just the same,” Maple sings on “Crop Circles,” a song that blends the catchiest offerings of emo’s second wave with turn-of-the-millennium alt-rock radio. Love song-slash-road song “’99,” which piles hooks upon hooks upon hooks into two and a half crushing minutes, is pure summertime joy from its gleefully Westerbergian opening couplet: “Nowhere you need to run to/Here comes the boy who loves you!” For a moment towards the end of the track, all other instruments cut out to make way for a spindly guitar solo—a single butterfly knocking around in the stomach of someone who’s fallen hard.
The line between consistency and predictability is razor thin, and aside from the lyrical themes, Hell Is an Airport doesn’t deviate much from the band’s tried-and-true formula: compact songs with lyrics about boredom and burnout; muscular riffs; and overdubbed vocals that lend themselves to singalongs. It would get old if the songs weren’t so damn catchy. “Run around, you won’t find nothing better,” Maple sings on “Crop Circles.” History repeats itself, he suggests, and whether you’re delivering the mail, touring with a band, or working any other job, boredom can be the only guarantee. The challenge, then, is finding fun in repetition; Liquid Mike can make even spinning your wheels sound like a joyride.
