Photos: Britt Andrews
Review: Ellie Robinson
Potentially hot take: Hot Mulligan are the best active emo band in the world right now. They sit firmly in the Goldilocks zone between the three most essential earmarks of modern emo – energy (oscillating from heartrending slow jams to pseudo-hardcore belters), emotion (balancing self-pity and snarling indignation) and vibes (knowing exactly when to pivot from wallowing to bouncing off the walls) – and as such they have a devoted following both online and in the pit. So it makes sense that for the Australian tour to support their recent fourth album, The Sound A Body Makes When It’s Still, the Michigan five-piece would nearly triple the scope of their last run on local shores (here in Sydney, for example, evolving from the 800-cap Factory Theatre to the 2,200-cap Roundhouse).
First up to the plate were Singaporean trio Forests, on this run making their long-awaited Australian debut. Musically they stuck to the core tenets of a midwest emo band chronically online in the mid-to-late 2010s: a little mathy and jazzy with it at times, but mostly predicated on twinkly noodling and big open chords carried by quippy one-liners, expertly written to be shouted along with at the top of your lungs. They made an immediate impression with their ripping half-cover of Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’, before slamming right into the anthemic ‘Fool Of Hell’ – the opening track of their most recent LP, 2010’s Get In Losers, We’re Going To Eternal Damnation.
Their performance as a whole was tight and locked-in, contrasting the often loose and jammy vibe of their studio recordings. It peaked with a spirited rendition of the band’s thrashy fan-favourite ‘Tamago’ (from 2016’s Sun Eat Moon Grave Party), but the heart of their set throughout was singer/bassist Darell Laser’s loveably dorky stage banter, replete with callbacks, shoutouts to SPEED (who he praised as “real Sydney shit”), and pleas for all the foot fetishists in the crowd to buy Forests merch.
Equally energised were Hot Mulligan’s fellow Michiganites, saturdays at your place, also making their Australian debut on this tour. They too deal in midwest emo, albeit decidedly less intense and topically broad than Hot Mulligan’s own varietal. The songs in their set leant on thematic staples like messy situationships and comings of age, spun through webs of melodically noodled guitar riffs and soul-warming basslines. Highlights came in cuts from last year’s glowing these things happen album – particularly the impossibly catchy ‘i’d rather be in michigan’ (which threw me back to one of the most underrated Modern Baseball gems, ‘Apartment’) and the emotionally charged ‘what am i supposed to do?’ (which saw drummer Gabe Wood steal the show on lead vocals).
Following an impressively short changeover, Hot Mulligan raced out to a full theatre of howling fans. They wasted no time getting straight to the meat of it, kicking off with Pilot hit ‘How Do You Know It’s Not Armadillo Shells?’ – a song normally reserved for the encore – with two more absolute scorchers, ‘Drink Milk And Run’ and ‘Shhhh! Golf Is On’, slammed out in quick succession. It was more than a quarter of the way through their set that the band finally shone a spotlight on The Sound A Body Makes When It’s Still (by which point they’d played another two songs from its predecessor, 2023’s Why Would I Watch), amping up the energy with the anthemic ‘It Smells Like Fudge Axe In Here’.
The set peaked just a few songs later with the eruptive one-two punch of ‘Prototheme’ and ‘I Don’t Think It’s The Right Time For Emojis’, two of Hot Mulligan’s most impactful songs both musically and in concept (the former, a theme song for local AEW champ Kyle Fletcher, being a scathing attack on class disparity, and the latter a biting assessment on the evils of organised religion). By this point in the night, the Roundhouse was bordering on humid from the gallons of sweat generated in the pit; so it felt right for Hot Mulligan to settle things down – just a touch – with the more danceable ‘Bon Jonah’.
From there came the more emotional strikers, with the most notable two being the new album’s standout song ‘Monica Lewinskibidi’ – the pace-shifting climax of which surprisingly hit even harder live than it does on the record (and it hits devastatingly hard on the record) – and a showcase of co-vocalist/rhythm guitarist Chris Freeman’s belting chops with ‘Green Squirrel In Pretty Bad Shape’. But of course the set ended on a high note: with ‘Armadillo Shells’ being relegated to the top end of the setlist, it only made sense that Hot Mulligan would leave us with their biggest chant-along classic, ‘Equip Sunglasses’. We’d be unsurprised to learn that folks on the other side of UNSW could hear us all howl in tandem with Nathan “Tades” Sanville.
Unsurprisingly, Hot Mulligan themselves were in peak form. While he admitted to being more tired than he normally would be at a show, Tades pulled through to give a hundred percent to every impassioned line he belted into the mic. In-between songs, he made callbacks to things that happened during the openers’ sets: he encouraged us to yell “fuck Newcastle” instead of “one more song” ahead of the encore (referencing one punter that voiced their distain for the northern city during Forests’ set) and as enshrined in law by saturdays at your place frontman Esden Stafne, when crowd-surfers remained in the air after a song had finished, they were to be frozen in place (or as Tades preferred, “put in air jail”) and rotated around “like you’re microwaving them”.
Though weighty at 22 songs, the set flew by in just over an hour, leaving us starving for more. Hopefully it won’t be long before Destroy All Lines drag Hot Mulligan back for another round of jaunty emo chaos.
