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‘Let’s Start Degeneracy’ finds Atlanta-based trio MICROWAVE getting older. Mind you, there’s no mustiness here. This is a record that strips away the bullshit to see the band at their most liberated and, as vocalist Nathan Hardy says, “self-actualised”. Check out our latest Upset cover story.
Words: Steven Loftin.
Photos: Bridget Craig.
‘Let’s Start Degeneracy’ finds Atlanta-based trio Microwave getting older. Mind you, there’s no mustiness here. This is a record that strips away the bullshit to see the band at their most liberated and, as vocalist Nathan Hardy says, “self-actualised”.
Following their 2014 debut ‘Stovall’, the group – completed by bassist Tyler Hill and drummer Timothy “Tito” Pittard – have been on a journey, particularly Nathan. Having grown up in a Mormon household, his breaking away from that led to ‘Stovall’ being a masked revelation – through fear of giving too much away to his family and peers who didn’t know he’d jumped ship. 2016 follow-up ‘Much Love’ turned away from this entirely.
“I wanted it to be straight up, autobiographical, personal anecdote type thing,” he recalls. “That album was written in the time period that I talked to my parents about the fact that I wasn’t a Mormon and left the church and felt empowered by doing the thing that I wanted to do; touring around in a band and not being Mormon.”
Since then, Microwave have become a much-loved entry in the canon of mid-10s emo-affiliated bands. Their 2022 rollout of ‘Let’s Start Degeneracy”s first single ‘Circling The Drain’ found an awaiting eager audience, which Nathan puts down to a bustling interest in touring mates such as Modern Baseball, Pinegrove, and Hot Mulligan, as well as a shaken-soda-can-effect post-pandemic with gigs roaring back to life. But before they could embark on this new endeavour, there was some growing to do.
Microwave’s third album, 2019’s ‘Death Is A Warm Blanket’, is where Nathan plumbed the depths of reckoning with his newly acquainted freedom. “I definitely dwelled and let myself spend time with the darker side of that coin – I indulged the feelings of self-pity,” he says.
Moving forward, Nathan knew he needed to break out of this mindset. But it didn’t come as an immediate revelation: “It was hard to finish music,” he remembers. “I feel like I intuitively knew that I needed to find another thread of hope because I was working on more music that was an even heavier album than the last one, and I wasn’t really finishing the lyrics for the songs because there’s a self-defeating when you have that what’s the point mentality? It saps your dopamine.”
Having spent the best part of his twenties realising a dream and the pitfalls (“I’ve been sleeping on couches for four out of the last eight or nine years”), he quickly realised that he was en route to becoming the exact thing he’d had thrown at him as a fear-mongering technique in his religious upbringing.
“These are my values and the things that I care about”
Nathan Hardy
He mentions feeling like he was becoming “the self-fulfilling prophecy of whatever my Mormon peers and family would have thought would happen if you venture away from the church,” he chuckles now. “The classic ‘Oh, yeah, no, he’s gonna get addicted to drugs, and he’s gonna come crawling back after he gets out of rehab and come back to Jesus’.”
Steering himself right as he entered his late twenties, ‘Let’s Start Degeneracy’ is the result of a few years of exploring and chilling, both sonically and metaphysically. It’s an album born from micro-dosing psychedelics, as well as Microwave taking their foot off the pedal for a moment and decidedly being happier.
“Looking back, it kind of feels like some like Unabomber manifesto type shit or something,” he laughs at the album’s content. “There’s almost a preachy element to it, like these are my values and the things that I care about and some like really kind of point blank ways. There’s a lot of statements of value.” The most prescient of which comes in the recent single ‘Bored Of Being Sad’ which determines ‘Let’s Start Degeneracy”s thematic through-line with a resoundingly mature ending of: “Shit’s really not so bad, I created this hell, I have no one to blame but myself.”
It also deals with the idea of being a band and the ruthless nature of the industry, but as with all things negative, the best form of attack is a positive one. “I’m still trying to internalise those concepts and stuff because it’s really easy to just replace one stressor with another stressor,” he admits. “And just be addicted to stress or whatever. I feel like I don’t identify as being sad and depressed as much anymore, but I’m definitely like a type A high-stress personality,” he chuckles.
Trying to undo an inherent nature is difficult. However, those microdosing sessions helped change to happen. From these explorations, realisations would come to Nathan and Tito. “The therapeutic value is more, and it stays with you for a while afterwards,” he explains. “Because you build up a tolerance to fear and stress, you get super tightened up, and afterwards, it’s like, ‘Man, life is easy’. It helps you internalise the fact that you create your reality by how you choose to identify.”
‘Let’s Start Degeneracy’ is a textured effort that speaks to this new form of thinking. Mostly inspired by the likes of Frank Ocean, Big Thief and Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Ghosts’ series, soundtracking their dosing, sonic revelations unfurled. “A lot of those records that I love and the things that blew me away while I was in that state… It’s just like, man, I’ve never heard anything like this before, like, ‘Oh my god, are you hearing this shit? How did he think of that, man?’”
These mind-opening experiences are where Nathan finds his inspiration igniting. “It feels like you’ve expanded your vocabulary with it,” he mentions. “With these new influence tools in my bank, I can have more colours to paint with. You can do things like have a really chill, poppy song and then just rip in a noisy, shreddy solo in the middle.”
This fourth outing is a chance for Microwave to stretch their creative muscles. Delving into their own series of layers and textures, both sonically and figuratively, the record opens with ‘Portals’, a soothing hymn sung by Nathan’s girlfriend, and acts as a remoulding of Nathan’s religious beginnings by turning them to his advantage.
“With these new influence tools in my bank, I can have more colours to paint with”
Nathan Hardy
“I feel like I have an underlying anti-religious bent at this point in general; I’m pretty against organised religion,” he explains, “but we came originally as Microwave, and me personally, from a place of religious influence, obviously growing up and everything, and then transformed that into what Microwave is today, and who I am today. It felt like on a micro-cosmic level that we took this thing that was a hymn, and then we added this context of therapeutic drug use, which is contrary to the underlying beliefs or practices of where that comes from within Christianity and everything like they’d probably discourage.” Even the sounds in the background are from a venture Nathan and Tito made down to Peru for a retreat to experience the psychedelic Ayahuasca. “The second verse of the version that’s on ‘Portals’, ‘Time is fleeting, deathbeds are calling. Calling for you and for me’ – it’s dark!” he says.
This very well may be the darkest that the ‘Let’s Start Degeneracy’ era gets. As Nathan explains, “I feel like it has like a hopeful tinge to it.” This is based on the results of their journeys to the spiritual side. Rarely do Microwave enter into the angst of old, now it’s all about breathing space and letting the noises and textures develop into a broader picture of who they’ve become.
‘Strangers’ is a studiously muted cut, and for the most part, the record remains this way. It peels back the anger and darkness to let the light in. ‘LSD’ is ferociously woozy, ‘Omni’ glitters with a mid-00s indie twinkle, while ‘Concierto’ is an entirely instrumental, genteel segue. No moment repeats; it’s a world away from the depths they explored before. So, after all is said and done, does Nathan think Microwave have achieved a more wisened state?
“I would think that we’re wiser. We’re definitely wiser people than we were five years ago or this, especially before that,” he laughs. And this is where ‘Let’s Start Degeneracy’ wears its pride. It’s a band that has embraced its influences and strays away from those more intense guitar-bass-drum setups to create something that intuits a maturity befitting Microwave’s journey. Turning their sound into “something that felt like it was less derivative of our influences and everything and felt more fresh, this is really these people… there’s definitely something added that is like, where did that come from? Which I feel like is part of coming into your own.” ■
Microwave’s album ‘Let’s Start Degeneracy’ is out 26th April. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
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