HOT GLUE TAKE US THROUGH THEIR DEBUT ALBUM ‘HATCHET’
Hot Glue is an indie-rock group from Naarm/Melbourne who have just released their debut album ‘Hatchet’. The trio have seen nothing but love and support from those around Australia. To celebrate this huge release, Hot Glue have taken us through a track-by-track rundown of the whole album.
Honey: ‘Honey’ is a song we wrote together line by line together in Pearl’s bedroom, and is where the eponymous hatchet first appears. The harmonies at the very end came about during the recording process and now makes the end of this song one of our favourite moments when we play live.
Give It Away: This one is a bit of an embarrassing meta-narrative about writing songs about a secret crush on a person which in itself reveals the crush. It went through many iterations while recording with acoustic guitar, keys, piano, anvil and various backing vocals, but ultimately ended up pretty close to how we play it live, just with that additional cowboy-esque guitar line. Lily and Henry actually played most of the guitar on this one.
Final Girl: Inspired by many female-fronted horror movies like ‘Jennifer’s Body’ and ‘Carrie’, Pearl wrote this song as a mish-mash of horror tropes. In the breakdown chorus Pearl sings a little bit like a werewolf and Lily thought it would be funny if Henry did an actual werewolf howl, so now we get to howl with a crowd of people like the moon is full at every Hot Glue gig.
Roadkill: This song is one of our angriest with its passive aggressive apologies and accusations. It’s all about abandonment and loneliness and the lengths you’ll go to when you want to convince someone to forgive you. We wanted to keep the recording of the song simple, since its lyrics are the focus for us. The moment it seemed to all come together was when we added Lily’s harmonies. Contrasting to the themes of loneliness in the lyrics, the two vocals supporting each other in that second verse have a huge impact.
The Knife: This song was one of the first written for the album and is about not wanting to forgive. I (Pearl) wrote it at a time where I felt like I had to be reminded of why I was so angry because it was more painful to hold onto resentment than to pretend I could look past it. I’m not very good at staying angry, I want to get the apologies out of the way and just get along. But I think this song was partly giving myself permission to be angry at least for a moment, even though it doesn’t feel good.
Slow Death: ‘Slow Death’ is the ballad of the album. We initially struggled to work out how to record this one. We tried using a keyboard and arranging the instruments in different ways, but ultimately fell back on the fairly simple way we play it live. We did end up adding a shimmery guitar part to the choruses that lifts them up that little bit more.
Consequence: Pearl came to the band with this song fully written, then Lily and Henry came up with the rhythm that drives the first half of the song. The guitar anti-solo was something we had been wanting to do for a while and it was really interesting to record, sort of felt like ghost-hunting. We had no idea what we were looking for with it, but once we heard it we were so pumped.
Limousine: I (Pearl) wrote this one in between lockdowns while trying to get back in the swing of normal socialisation with people I hadn’t really seen since highschool. I was struggling to tell if I had just drifted from these people in the normal way people do as they grow up or if I was sabotaging these relationships on purpose. The limousine in question was our ride to Year 12 formal which I was really against at the time, yet can’t help but look back on fondly. It just worked as an analogy for those friendships in retrospect.
Forgive It All: Lily wrote ‘Forgive it All’ about the difficulty of getting to a place where you can totally forgive someone. There’s a line in the second verse that goes “I can bury this hatchet after I take it around the block first” that really sums up some of the big feelings on the album. I remember having the idea for Pearl to sing the last line up the octave and it totally brought the song together for me.
What a Shame: This one was written a few years ago for a solo project of Pearl’s with a very different acoustic sound. Henry listened to the demo and really believed Pearl should scream that last chorus. It ended up in the Hot Glue live set list at a certain time and just seemed to naturally unfold into this huge heavy outro, nothing like the original version. What a Shame is our favourite to play live, it feels strangely triumphant despite its pretty glum lyrics.