by Myles Tiessen (@myles_tiessen)
There is a stark cruelty to Hot Garbage. The Toronto band’s music evokes the feelings of a dark, brooding industrial adventure through a radiation-thick wasteland. Their auspicious psychedelia welds to the disorienting melodies in a factory designed and operated by the destitute, the lonely, and the abandoned. It’s haunting music that spotlights and embraces the end times.
But, like any balanced dualism, there is inversely an illuminating beauty to their songs. The way they play with the hypnotic motorik rhythms and transcendental synths signal their indeterminate arrival in some empyrean destination is a hopeful testament to the power of self-determination in a world absent of hope. Their brand new sophomore album, Precious Dream, is a foray into the limitless liminal spaces of disorientation; its goal is to find solace in the chaos, to laugh in the face of cruelty.
photo credit: Laura-Lynn Petrick
“The album as a whole kind of represents a spectrum of emotions and feelings because that’s, I think, a lot more like the human experience and that kind of unique experience we were all having in the time that it was being written,” says Hot Garbage bassist and vocalist Juliana Carlevaris.
Composed alongside her brother, Alessandro Carlevaris, Dylan Gamble, and Mark Henein, she says the band’s intention with this album wasn’t to distill the feelings of entropy and malaise that dominated the COVID-19 era when they were writing. But instead says, “I think that kind of just happened naturally.”
“The most challenging part was just trying to assess this material while being completely separated,” she says. “I don’t know if I can speak for everyone, but there were definitely moments for me that was just a complete lack of inspiration and motivation to do anything at that time.”
“In everybody’s personal lives, there were really dark moments of sort of going through stuff alone, just the frustration of not being able to get together as a band and make music and tour,” she says. “But every once in a while during that time, there were also some lighter moments. I think just even within songs, we’re trying to kind of show depth and not go down too much of a super intense, dark place. We try to find a balance.”
Carlevaris’ demeanor is reflective of the cool dissociation of the music. Her continuous cadence easily flows through the conversation, and just when you sense a detached affection, her insightful accounts and testimony prove a deep passion and care for her art and its effects on the world. It’s easy to see the personality of the music in Carlevaris, and it’s clear just how much of the band’s identity is in Precious Dream.
“We have such varied tastes and varied backgrounds in music, so it’s almost impossible for us to just kind of keep it going in one direction. We actually have to rein it in quite a bit more than the other way around. Because otherwise, it’s all just, yeah, just got a little bit crazy,” laughs Carlevaris.
It’s hard to imagine what Precious Dream would be if this weren’t the sound of a band that “got a little bit crazy.” The album is a whirlwind of manic chatter, garage rock ramblings, and punk rock effervescence. Tracks like “Lowering” and “Mystery” lean heavily on a repetitive, almost surf-goth riff swirling in space. Album highlight, “Tunnel Traps,” features a sustained distorted refrain that sounds like the inside of a jet engine test facility, and an all too quick, methodical instrumental solo reflects the haunting sirens of an incoming aerial bombing.
Part of that enveloping sound comes from their collaboration with producer Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck, Preoccupation, METZ). Walsh’s distinctive analog obsession can be heard particularly in the second half of Precious Dream, where the cosmic continuum of the songs endlessly floats from one to the next. Some of the album’s longest songs sit next to one another on the B-side, hypnotically enticing the listener into an ineffable world of euphoric catatonia.
Carlevaris says working with Walsh on their debut Ride gave them the confidence to experiment with different structures or time signatures – like the hyper-extended “Traveller/Caravan” or propulsive “Sarabandit” – in a way that reflected their growth as songwriters. “I think we already knew that, like, whatever we give him, he’ll kind of just be able to just put his spin on it,” says the bassist.
Carlevaris steadily emphasizes that even the album’s most violent moments are always accompanied by relative elegance. She says it’s about subverting the audience’s expectations of the band or even expectations of what an album born during the pandemic could be. That intentional disorientation stems from the band’s interest in the occult and French philosophy. “In my opinion, one of the most interesting things in life is the mystery and what you don’t know. So I think playing with that and being a little bit cryptic is something that kind of comes naturally in this band.”
She says relating to the indifference of mysticism, absurdist art, and concepts dealing with alienation has always piqued the band’s interests but almost became a survival mechanism throughout the isolation of the pandemic. “Precious Dream really shows that everybody was kind of feeling and dealing with life stuff on their own. But, a lot of that was the same because we were all in the same situation.”
The themes of dread, loneliness, and isolation may be responses to nightmares, but “even the nightmares and the bad dreams are precious, as an experience,” reflects Carlevaris before adding, “but sometimes life is just so fucked that you just have to like laugh at it.”
Precious Dream is a product of the times. It’s a band simultaneously distancing themselves from the vindictive world around them while simultaneously leaning into the pain and emotions that hurt the most. The thematic nucleus of Precious Dream is found within “Mystery.” In that track, Alessandro Carlevaris sings, “Out of time and out of touch/ You can run as fast as you can,” before proclaiming: “Cruel indifference wins again.”