Hot Mulligan aren’t known for their subtlety. They blend humor with horror, prone to writing anthems about the death of a pet rat, posing with Highland cattle in their videos, and committing to ridiculous song titles while deftly capturing depressive states in their lyrics. As frontman Tades Sanville said to us in 2023, “You can be sad for a while, but mostly, it’s just indifference toward life. We are goofy and stupid and also depressed and down. They go hand-in-hand naturally as a pretty common coping mechanism.”
It’s exactly this feeling that makes Hot Mulligan songs so easy to latch onto. Whether they’re opening for Fall Out Boy at Madison Square Garden or withering in Vegas heat at When We Were Young Festival, the Lansing, Michigan-bred gents have opened up space for crowds to hear their bleakest thoughts reflected back at them, to unleash despair while throwing down. Yet their challenge to themselves for their new album, The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still, was even more daunting — to put out their “best piece of work yet.” The LP is shot through with vulnerability and frustration, unafraid to bare all over springy hooks. Sanville travels through self-lacerating epiphanies, paranoia, and the grief of losing a grandparent in Tokyo parking lots, screaming until his voice cracks.
Read more: Arm’s Length break down every song on There’s a Whole World Out There
Hot Mulligan are currently bringing those songs on the road with Drug Church, Arm’s Length, and Anxious, continuing tomorrow in Brooklyn. Still in the early days of their headlining tour, the band opened up about group chat blunders, the intention behind The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still, and the popular Weezer song that’s actually underrated.
A funny or bizarre tour story
There is this one time our tour manager was out on a Bird scooter, and I think he got hit by a car. Just before, he was asking what we all wanted to eat. I didn’t see the message in the group chat that he had been hit, and I put in my food order immediately, so the group chat was like, “I got hit by a car, will be there in a little bit.” Then the message typed by me was “chicken quesadilla.”
The statement of intent behind The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still
To make a better record than the last one — more mature, more thought out, give ourselves some more time, make our best piece of work yet.
Your ties to skate culture growing up, given the video for “And A Big Load”
I feel like it was baked into the scene of that time — pop punk and skateboard culture just went hand in hand, so when I was first listening to Green Day and Simple Plan and Good Charlotte and stuff, those were also my first times on a skateboard. Probably everyone in the band at some point in their life had at least a toe in skate culture.
Best fan interaction
There are people that make us stuff, which is really cool. Someone recently made us stickers and keychains of ourselves, and that was really nice.
Dumbest argument that’s happened in the tour van
One time, we had an argument over who left a banana behind that got the van infested with fruit flies, making it smell really bad. It was tragic.
The moment you realized the band could be a full-time job
Probably when we did the New Found Glory tour. I think that was one where it was long enough and good enough for our outreach that we came home, and it was like we didn’t lose money and we gained a bunch of fans, so this could be a long-term move.
Some of your favorite things to do outside of music
To take pictures and ride my motorcycle and pet my cats. Watching basketball is dope, too. [For Chris], talking about basketball and skateboarding. [For Ryan], sports and eating food. [For Brandon], hanging out with cats and playing video games. We’re people. We have hobbies.
Best live show you’ve seen this year
Third Eye Blind at Let’s Go Music Fest. Hot Mulligan loved that set.
The Hot Mulligan lyric that could go on a throw pillow
They’re all too sad to put on a throw pillow… Maybe “I am soap.”
The most underrated Weezer song because “Island in the Sun” isn’t a cover
“Hash Pipe” because [Rivers Cuomo] does just really sing in that falsetto half the time, and that’s crazy to me.
