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Hot Milk are a real anomaly in the music industry. They’ve toured America, sold out 2,000 capacity venues in the UK (a couple of times), played Jimmy Kimmel Live, and have a tour coming up with the legendary Foo Fighters (on top of their own headline tour at the end of the year).
The absurdity of their existence comes from the fact they’re only just gearing up to release their debut album, A Call To The Void, this Friday, August 25, 2023, after being a touring band for coming up to five years.
Before that, they dropped three vastly different EPs (including the five-star record The King and Queen of Gasoline). And A Call To The Void is perhaps their most eclectic collection of tracks yet.
Listening to the flow of the raucous, bleeding-heart, party record may lead you to think it was precisely mapped out. But Hot Milk stars Han Mee and Jim Shaw exclusively revealed to Express.co.uk they had prepared nothing when they were finally convinced to step into the recording studio.
“Honestly, on the first day, I cried my eyes out,” Han breathed. “I almost went home.” Who could blame her, though? They had just finished a tour in the USA and had barely stepped off the plane before they needed to get creative for their debut album. Talk about pressure, right? Han continued: “After three months on the road I wanted my mum – I’m quite a softy,” she added with a smirk. Jim agreed: “We walked in and we were just so overwhelmed by the blank page. We just sat down and we were exhausted – and we were so f******g tired.”
Buy Hot Milk – A Call To The Void vinyl
After getting to grips with the pressure that surrounded them, though, they used exactly that intense atmosphere to fuel what would become their first batch of tracks for A Call To The Void. “Basically, we wrote about what we were feeling at the time,” Han continued. “Let’s take it all back down: What are we feeling right now? Let’s write about that. We felt we were under so much pressure… I felt quite constricted – controlled, in a way. ‘You have to do this right now, there’s no other choice.'” But, ultimately, they made it work. Han grinned: “We wrote four singles in three days.”
Jim – ever the realist – pointed out: “They were long days – 9am to 3am. I think [the album] came out really well because we didn’t really overthink it. As it was coming together we looked back a little bit and understood what we were writing about: the raw visceral feelings about the then, and now, and the real current situation we were in.” Peering over at Han, he concluded: “I think the pressure did well!” She nodded: “We always work well under pressure.”
The final result, A Call To The Void, is Hot Milk’s most diverse collection of songs yet. Blending shredding guitars and electronica with even some rap verses and endless heaps of emotion; it’s certainly the culmination of their musical career thus far. But, with that said, the band were not concerned with pandering to anyone’s expectations during the writing and recording process. “I think it’s just naturally what comes to us,” Jim said of Hot Milk’s music as an evolving organism. “Because we listen to so many different genres and types of music. We want to bring that to our table.” Han cut in:” I get bored of rock music an awful lot. And I don’t really listen to it in my life anymore. I’m more into House and Drum N Bass and Dance music, and I would say my extracurricular activities now revolve around that side of music.” Han assured fans: “Don’t get me wrong, I’m a rock fan through and through – I’m an emo from my teenage years – I still love playing rock music, but to be that one-dimensional would be a disservice to ourselves. Hot Milk is a project for us to reflect what we want to play.”
After a beat, Han declared: “I’ve always said genre is a lie – since day one of this band – I’ve always known we’re going to write whatever we want. Really, it’s a conduit for creativity; this band is Hot Milk in its own right; it’s its own thing. It doesn’t necessarily fall into someone else’s bracket, and I would hate for it to be labelled as such.”
Jim chimed in: “The thing that kind of defines us is the emotional, the dramatic.” Whatever concept or theory Hot Milk as a collective are releasing music through: it’s working. The days after their debut album comes out they’ll be opening the main stage of Reading and Leeds Festivals (a “hard” slot, Jim admitted, as it’s very early on in the festival day. Despite this, he pointed out: “I don’t care where we’re playing, we’re always playing a Hot Milk show, at the end of the day.)”
Beyond the new album, though, where the hell will this Manchester duo go next, creatively?
Jim brushed off talks of what the next album or EP might sound like: “It’s a glint in our eye at the moment,” while adding he might want it to sound “heavier” with “more electronic” parts.
Han added: “We have some ideas for the next one … we don’t even know what the second album is going to sound like. And that’s an exciting place to be in.”
Hot Milk – A Call To The Void comes out Friday, August 25, 2023.
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