Hot Water Music: "'Light It Up' is definitely more on the political side"

Hot Water Music are back with an album that sees them go back to basics. Hey Jason, have you had a good summer so far? What’ve you guys been up to? Overall, yeah, it’s been a good summer. We all have pretty busy lives outside of the band - families, day jobs, other bands - so we’ve been doing our own respective things while still making plans for HWM. It’s a balancing act that we very narrowly succeed at. It’s been a little while since your last album, 2012’s ‘Exister’. We’ve been trying for about three years to get this record scheduled, written, and recorded, haha. Like I was saying, when you add in families, jobs, and then throw a five-hour flight to have us all in the same room, it’s not easy to get things moving. Also, we’re in our 40s now, so we move slower. How did you find self-producing ‘Light It Up’, and what was your favourite thing about doing it yourselves? The main thought behind self-producing was to - as derivative and cheesy as it sounds - get back to basics a little. (That’s such a canned response, but it’s true). To just write the songs, record them, and put them out without overthinking everything. ’Fuel for the Hate Game’ is the last time we self-produced, so we were pretty excited to see what we could make happen on our own 20 years later. Our FOH engineer - Ryan Williams - owns Black Bear Studio in Gainesville. He’s heard us more than anyone else for the past ten years, so it was a super comfortable environment to record in. Did you pick up any new tricks while self-producing? I think the main takeaway that we can all agree on is that stacking too many harmonies on backups sounds weird for our band… like a bad mash-up between Queen and Motorhead.