Thoughts on Hovvdy's Hovvdy
Texan indie band Hovvdy1—the songwriting duo of Charlie Martin and Will Taylor—are releasing their fifth album, the self-titled Hovvdy, on a new label (Arts & Crafts) this week, and it is gorgeous. Over the past few years, I’ve tentatively immersed myself in the band’s catalogue, growing to enjoy little bits of their albums, but never an entire project fully. 2021’s True Love was my introduction to the band, and I have kept the title track and “Junior Day League” in heavy rotation over the past couple years. From 2019’s Heavy Lifter, I’ve enjoyed “Mr. Lee”’s old-school boom-bap drums, “So Brite”’s luxuriant slowcore, and “Ruin (My Ride)”’s light indietronica accents.
I think my reluctance to fully embrace Hovvdy has been (at least partially) related to how manicured their records and general aesthetic have often felt. Sometimes, I’ve thought that 2018’s Cranberry would be best described as Duster fed through an Instagram filter. The “True Love” video illustrates all of this perhaps most instructively. The performative wilding out under a parachute and in an ATV(!), the ball glove and distressed tee tucked into weathered jeans—it’s just all too much, too a e s t h e t i c, though perhaps fitting for a band that met during a pickup baseball game. Hovvdy’s rugged—yet obviously curated?—“indie masculinity”2 has simultaneously attracted and repulsed me in equal measure, and prevented me from becoming a committed fan.
That is … until now with Hovvdy’s release! As is typical of modern rollouts, the band has been releasing a drip feed of singles from Hovvdy since late 2023: “Bubba,” “Jean,” “Portrait,” “Forever,” “Meant,” and “Make Ya Proud.” All of these singles have been undeniably great, with “Jean” being the first one that totally transfixed me back in November.
It’s hard to describe “Jean” in a way that doesn’t make it sound completely laughable to a propspective listener. Imagine if John Mayer—sometimes a point of comparison for Will Taylor’s vocals—decided to lean into hyperpop later in his career, adding a sawing fiddle3 to cascading beds of piano arpeggios and big, blocky drumbeats. Are you still with me? Okay, good lol. Another obvious reference point for Hovvdy since at least True Love has been cult singer-songwriter Alex G whose shapeshifting production and pitch-shifted vocals surely informed Hovvdy’s work on “Jean” and a few other moments on Hovvdy.
I felt justified in my adoration for “Jean” and Hovvdy’s other pre-release singles when I was reading the music journalist Josh Terry’s interview with Katy Kirby recently on Terry’s Substack, No Expectations. Speaking on the subject of “Bubba,” “Jean,” and “Portrait,” Kirby says:
I've always liked Hovvdy’s music but for some reason, these last three songs really make my brain explode in a way that usually only the most sugary pop music does. I also think that there's something very strangely The 1975-coded about a couple of those songs.
[…]
There are all of these melodic lines that are uncannily like the palette that band [The 1975] uses. But mostly, they're just really good songs. And also, they sound so interesting. There's a lot of ear candy in them and there are really fun melodies but the recording is a little bit shabby or fuzzy on purpose.
Much of the sumptuous sonic detail that Kirby notes in those songs’ production I think can be attributed to Hovvdy collaborating closely again with inventive producer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) and multi-instrumentalist Bennett Littlejohn on the new record. According to an interview with Our Culture’s Konstantinos Pappis, however, Sarlo challenged Martin and Taylor not to simply remake True Love, and to instead embrace messiness in their process, including location recording, generous amounts of room tone, and iPhone demos. All of this strengthened the duo’s work on Hovvdy.
Historically, a significant amount of Hovvdy’s appeal has been that—although Martin and Taylor are very capable songwriters on their own—something special happens when each colours in the other’s songs with his own little contributions that make it sound like Hovvdy. Martin’s work is frequently piano-based and clearly indebted to the Jon Brion and Elliott Smith school of intricate arrangement, whereas Taylor is generally a rawer vocalist in the emo or slowcore lineage with a deeper drawl and he tends to use guitar more.
On the new record, “Give It Up” is a nice illustration of Martin’s compositional sensibility. Starting as a plaintive keyboard-based song with simple lyrics—“Do you wanna give it up? No way / Do you wanna dig a new hole everyday? Searchin’ for somethin’ you think you’ve been missin’”—at 1:04 a massive drum part4 bursts out of the mix and carries the song through its next several minutes while the band rides a beautiful, loose groove to a sighing conclusion.
“Heartstring” is a stunning Taylor number on Hovvdy that showcases his distinct strengths. Over a mesmerizing, repetitive acoustic guitar figure, he sings open-hearted, questioning lyrics5 leading to a powerful chorus—“That’s why I run my mouth around like that / ’Cause I know what you know”—and, later, a dazzling acoustic slide solo. Album closer “A Little” is another powerful Taylor showcase, surprising the listener as a full-blown alt-country ballad that makes a compelling case for Hovvdy leaning even further into their Texan roots on future work.
Two other tracks on Hovvdy impressed me immediately for their sonic inventiveness. In December 2020, the band released their second collection of covers, the aptly named Covers 2 EP, which featured a wonderful cover of Coldplay’s “Warning Sign” powered by an explosive drum break.
Late album highlights “Every Exchange” and “Bad News” reminded me of that “Warning Sign” cover. The former has an actual breakbeat(!) and pitches up Taylor’s vocals over a simple, almost pop punky acoustic guitar riff, moving the track into the aforementioned Alex G Zone where meaningful boundaries between genres rapidly start dissolving. The latter—though, admittedly, it doesn’t have programmed drums like “Warning Sign”—is still a groove-based, instant earworm track, featuring Taylor and Martin trading off on vocals for the first time since 2017, flowing over a bass-led arrangement.
The strongest thing that can be said about Hovvdy is simply how many facets of the band it manages to contain and exhibit across its 54 minutes. Oddly, the record even feels a bit backloaded to me with the run from “Meant” to “A Little” being particularly strong. What’s more, despite the band having released a whopping six pre-release singles—a tendency that many music fans bemoan these days because it detracts from a listener’s unified album listening experience—I keep finding tracks on Hovvdy that reveal new entrancing details. The album is a major step forward and a defining statement from a group that I wasn’t sure had this in them. I’m sure Hovvdy will sound even better as the nights get longer and the temps get warmer, too.
Pronounced “howdy.”
The “True Love” video honestly makes me wish Carles was still writing Hipster Runoff. I can only imagine the things he would’ve written about it. (“Check out these #authentic altbags dressing like they’re in Little League in 1995,” etc).
I remember when I first discovered “Jean,” I wondered if the fiddle part was ~spiritually related~ to this PinkPantheress song from the Barbie OST.
Both Martin and Taylor were drummers in other bands when they met and formed Hovvdy. I think this explains the focus on rhythm in much of their material.
Lyrical simplicity is common to both Martin and Taylor’s work in Hovvdy. It is best, in my experience, to accept the lyrics for what they are and to not go in expecting dense or inventive poetics. Conversational is definitely more of the vibe!