Even taking into account the industry’s desire for fresh facedness, HotWax are notably prodigious; just a few years removed from college, they’ve already established themselves sufficiently to make Hot Shock one of the most anticipated UK debuts of the year. What’s more, their first LP is built on a bedrock of sounds popularised before they gained sentience: hooky bubblegrunge, alt-rock buzzsaw guitars, chunky 90s-leaning riffs. With the bitterness that comes inevitably with age, it’s safe to say: they shouldn’t be this good at this kind of music.
That viewpoint would be failing to consider the hours they’ve put on the board already. They’ve built an impressive, constantly evolving catalogue of singles and EPs, and have made their name most particularly as an airtight live act. Hot Shock does exactly what inaugural LPs should - HotWax take all that good stuff and add just the right amount of polish, while retaining the oomph and freewheeling momentum with which they’ve established their reputation to date.
The album brings in a clutch of esteemed producers, most notably Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, but the emphasis is on keeping the grit front and centre. At their best, the result is a delightful controlled frenzy. The breakneck “One More Reason” encapsulates this particularly well: Lola Sam’s gurgling bassline is hypnotically repetitious, leaving singer Tallulah Sim-Savage free to snake around on the guitar melodies or unleash blasts of feedback in the Thurston Moore school of noise-rock. They quarry for even heavier sounds on the brilliantly blown out “Chip My Teeth For You”. They take the quiet-loud dynamic extolled by Pixies et al and shunt it way into the red, the chorus lurching into double time through the powers of sheer frustration. “I’d chip my teeth for you, would you / Chip your teeth for me too?” Sim-Savage spews over a whirlwind of fuzz.
Crucially, there’s plenty to the record beyond sound and fury. Highlight “Dress Our Love” is the kind of swaggering, hooky indie-rock that could once crack the orthodox Top 40, and on the earworm strengths exhibited here could maybe do again. Alfie Sayers’ drumming shuffles and skips with breezy confidence, the riff is killer, and the chorus is pure pop glue. They’ve even got a middle eight breakdown section, giving the bass space to properly rumble and getting off some instant quotables: “Your tears will never dry / If you can’t even cry.”
The experience is over in somewhat of a flash – perhaps no big problem in an era of super-deluxe editions, but HotWax do leave themselves with a few modes left unexplored. They close things off with the mostly acoustic ballad (of sorts) “Pharmacy”. It’s the only major shift in gear across the sub-30 minute album and does leave a listener wondering whether Hot Shock could have been a shade more substantive were they to widen the sound a little more. Are they in fact too exuberant for their own good?
The simple answer is no, they’re not. This is everything you could want in a debut record, a distillation of a confident and coherent sound with plenty of room to develop, and plenty of time in which to do so. The band themselves may make some listeners feel old, but they’ve more than enough energy to make you feel young again, too.
