It’s been four years since HotWax last came up for air. Since signing with Marathon Records, the Sussex trio have released two EPs, supported Brighton rockers Royal Blood around the USA, and played more festivals than they’ve had hot dinners. Oh, and they’re still only 20 years old.

After all that time discovering the world and their place within it, they’ve found the perfect moment to release their blistering debut album, ‘Hot Shock’. An ode to their non-stop new lives, it’s an album that represents a band coming to terms with the chaos.

“It’s all about those heightened, intense moments that we call ‘hot shocks’, and how that impacts life,” singer Tallulah Sim-Savage reveals. “We wrote it between January and June last year and then recorded it in snippets between touring; we would come back for a few weeks, totally deranged and full of adrenaline, write a song and then get back on the road.”

2024 was a year dedicated to getting their name out into the world, having released debut EPs’ Invite Me, Kindly’ and ‘A Thousand Times’ in 2023. A year that started on a come down from a US tour with Royal Blood, the band then went on to tour with US power-rockers Deap Vally and post-punk prodigies Warmduscher across Europe and the UK, not to mention festivals all over the shop. That year out of the release cycle, though, naturally built pressure around the band, with everyone asking the same question: when’s that album coming, then?

“I definitely think we feel pressure now because of all the stuff we’ve done,” bassist Lola Sam states. “It all happens so quick that it’s quite hard to process.”

She continues: “There was quite a long period of time where we didn’t release any music, which was probably a mistake. There’s a pressure to keep pumping stuff out because the world’s attention span is so short, and people move onto new stuff so quick, but we were just saying yes to everything.”

It’s important to remember just how young HotWax are, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the maturity of their performance on this new album, learning when to pare back the noisiest noise-rock to focus on melody and tenderness. Nonetheless, the story of their band so far is really one of growth, both personal and musical.

“We’ve definitely grown into it,” Tallulah nods. “When we first started writing songs, we were 16 years old, which is so different to how we feel now at 20. We’ve got more life experience now and seen so much that we’ve learned a lot. The last two years have been the first time that we’ve been fully surrounded by music, whether we’re in the studio, on the road, or just always talking to musicians, without being in school or college. Yeah, it’s all pretty crazy, actually.”

Crazy, frantic, chaotic, whatever you want to call it, it finds its way onto ‘Hot Shock’ in some form or another. From the minute opening track, ‘She’s Got A Problem’ blasts into existence, it’s clear that this is an album that’s not about to pump the brakes before ‘Wanna Be A Doll’ embodies the bouncing, brawling live show that the band have perfected over the last few years.

Without their live show, where the trio truly spark into their effervescent best, this album may not have come to fruition, as it was during a small, sweaty gig in London that their co-producer introduced herself.

“We played a show at Third Man Records in London,” Tallulah remembers, “and after that gig, Catherine [Marks] came up to us and was like, ‘I couldn’t even see you guys, but I need to recreate this energy; I have to produce your next album’. It was the first time that a producer has come up to me after a show, and I’ve been like, ‘Ok, guys, we need to work with this person’.”

A producer who already has boygenius, Foals and Wolf Alice on her impressive portfolio asking to work with the band was a pretty clear sign that they were on the right track. Determined to bring in the frenetic, fiery feeling of their live show into their recorded work, Catherine and the band set about adding new techniques to the studio, expanding the reach of the HotWax sound.

“We basically had a gig inside the studio,” Tallulah grins, “we invited all our friends, had a free bar and just played a show so that we could get that feeling on the record. Then just went back with overdubs and tidied up the edges.”

“It’s the first time we’ve recorded live, all in the room together,” she continues. “We’ve been playing together for such a long time now that we know each other really well, so we went in and recorded without click or anything, just feeling the energy in the room. We didn’t want to add loads of layering on the guitars or anything; we wanted it to sound like a three-piece for the first time.”

“It was great for me,” drummer Alfie Sayers continues. “It’s nice to have Lola in the room so I can hear her bass in front of me and not have to rely on click or recordings. We always did drums first, though, so trying to wake up enough to do that every day was interesting!”

After some initial trepidation about writing an album, trying to think of ideas and keep it cohesive, it was Catherine’s magic touch that reassured the band that they were on the path to something very special indeed.

“The first song we tried to write was ‘Wanna Be A Doll’, but we rewrote it so many times that I just couldn’t see how it was gonna work,” Tallulah recalls. “It was really daunting knowing we were doing a whole album rather than just an EP, but once we got about halfway through, it seemed to come together.”

“I think it’s the sound and the production that ties it all together in the end,” Lola adds. “Everyone on the team had the same vision of how we wanted it to sound.”

Tallulah confirms, “The first song we recorded was ‘Chip My Tooth For You’. When I heard that back, with the distorted vocals and guitar tones, it was the first time I heard a song and loved how every aspect sounded.”

Partly inspired by the lack of time the band had to record the album, partly inspired by the immediate feeling of the live show that they tried to infuse into their work, they felt like London was the only place that they could record… for the most part.

“We might have ended up with a very different sound if we’d gone on some relaxing writing retreat, but we felt like it had to be RAK Studios in central London. We needed to see life happening for inspiration; it’s important to the way the album sounds. The acoustic song, though, we recorded at Joshua Tree in California because it was beautiful, magical, really inspiring - it just felt right.”

Spoiler alert: there’s an acoustic song on this record! Spoiler alert #2: It’s called ‘Pharmacy’, and it’s at the end of the album. Spoiler alert #3: It might not be the last acoustic moment we hear from HotWax…

“It’s mine and Lola’s dream to write a 20-song acoustic album,” Tallulah chuckles. “I love ‘Pharmacy’ so much because it’s just one of those songs I write in my room that, in the past, I wouldn’t have done anything with or would have been turned up to become a HotWax song. It felt like the perfect song to end the album on; it’s a comforting, calm song at the end of a record that’s all about crazy shit.”

Although a Neil Young tribute album might be next on the agenda, for now, the band are as heavily inspired by huge rock bands as ever before, adding depth and resilience to ‘Hot Shock’ that grounds what could otherwise be an uncontrollable spiral of screamed out lyrics and hardcore-adjacent drumming.

“I guess we might get called punk because of Tallulah’s shouty vocals,” Lola reflects, “but we haven’t really listened to old-school punk in that way. Our influences really came from 90s grunge and indie-rock bands, like we tend to stick to two pedals that we like which made the guitars sound a bit more like Queens of the Stone Age.”

Tallulah continues, “Yeah, we were listening more to 90s bands; it was a lot of PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth. Lyrically, I was inspired by Cat Power, which I think really comes through in the slower songs.”

It’s this thick, grimy, grungy sound that gives the album that extra dimension, swirling through the atmospheric shoegaze-adjacent ‘Strange To Be Here’ before smashing back into toxic love song ‘Dress Our Love’. All of this throwback rock, along with their “in the moment” songwriting, resulted in an album that was rooted in the exact mindset the band found themselves in at the start of 2024.

"The lyrics came really quickly for this one," Tallulah proffers. "Usually, I overthink them and go back to them again and again. I consciously left them alone this time, I trusted my first instinct, just whatever was written in the moment. It fitted with the whole 'Hot Shock' thing; everything's just happening so quickly that we just have to get in, get it done, get out and move on to the next thing."

That doesn't mean that HotWax can't step back and appreciate what they've done or where they are, though. Looking back over their career so far, it only seems to dawn on Tallulah in the moment that they've actually got an album coming out. "It feels like a big accomplishment to have got it done a year that was so full of touring. God, yeah, it's really scary. Like, it's good scary, but it's still scary."

It's this fear that keeps the blood pumping through every inch of 'Hot Shock' and of the band more widely and explains why excitement around them remains at a fever pitch. "I just wanna keep going," Lola states. "Just wanna keep doing what we're doing because I think we're doing pretty well. Hopefully, the second album's even better."

No matter what comes next, HotWax will continue to thrive in the make-or-break moments that have brought them their debut album, and there's certain to be plenty more of those to come. ■