Hot Water Music
Vows
Equal Vision Records
Friday, May 10, 2024
Sacrifice. Loyalty. Camaraderie. These aren’t just words, they are the qualities that have defined Hot Water Music’s songs, lyrics and ideology for the past three decades. However, instead of celebrating 30 years of existence with a nostalgia lap or formulaic album, the band decided to mark this milestone with their most ambitious collection of songs to date. Correspondingly, Vows sees the band—guitarists/vocalists Chuck Ragan, Chris Wollard and Chris Cresswell as well as bassist Jason Black and drummer George Rebelo—taking their pioneering punk sound to bold new heights via inventive arrangements, pop-friendly sensibilities and a new generation of musical guests ranging from Dallas Green of City And Colour/Alexisonfire To Brendan Yates and Daniel Fang of Turnstile.
The result is an album that doesn’t solidify the band as a musical force to be reckoned with — that happened a long time ago — as much as it shows how open the fivesome are to experimenting with a formula that’s already taken them from sweaty clubs in their hometown of Gainesville, Florida, to massive venues all over the world countless times over as they continue to forge a connection with fans that they’ve never once taken for granted.
“I was probably the most prepared that I’d ever been going into a session when we recorded these songs, and there was just a lot of really positive electric energy going around,” Ragan explains. “I think a lot of that had to do with us reflecting on the past and the relationships we’ve had with each other over the years.” In order to capture these songs, Hot Water Music chose to reunite with longtime collaborator Brian McTernan—who produced the band’s classic albums such as 2001’s A Flight and a Crash to 2002’s Caution as well 2022’s Feel The Void—which allowed Hot Water Music to revisit the raw, guitar-driven power of the band’s classic releases like 1997’s Fuel for the Hate Game and Forever and Counting while still capturing the current dynamics of the band, most notably the inclusion of The Flatliners frontman Cresswell, who joined Hot Water Music in 2017 when Wollard stopped performing with Hot Water Music live. Not only does Cresswell feel more fully integrated on this album than he did on Feel The Void, his melodic vocals add a new dimension of tunefulness to these songs and smooth out its rough edges. “Cresswell brings so much energy to a pen of old dogs that have been doing this for a very long time,” Ragan explains with a laugh.
This newfound energy is evident on Cresswell-fronted songs such as the staccato fire of “Burn Forever” and purposeful power of “Side Of The Road.” Alternately, “Chewing on Broken Glass” is vintage Wollard and shows his mastery of dynamics and literary lyricism hasn’t dulled as he ponders, “Is this all happening?” Then, of course, there’s Ragan, who is the scruffy heart of the band and a successful solo musician in his own right whose impressive vocal abilities shine through on the blazing opener “Menace” and atmospheric anthem “Fences.”
“I’ve learned a lot since the early days when I lost my voice making ‘Caution’,” Ragan admits. “Back then, Brian [McTernan] set me up with a vocal coach named Mark Baxter and so much of what Mark taught stuck with me, and working with Brian again, it brought a lot of that stuff back.” This progression is mirrored in the music, which sees the band’s rhythm section demonstrating technical prowess via inventive fills and tasteful tempo shifts that serve these songs’ unconventional sonic aesthetic. “This time around, George and I had a lot of fun—and for us, I think that happens when there aren’t a lot of straightforward songs,” Black adds.
The legacy that Hot Water Music have built over the past 30 years has endeared them to today’s generation of punk and hardcore acts and they are integrated into this album in a way that’s sometimes unexpected but not unprecedented. “We haven’t had guests on an album in a long time and we used to do that a lot,” Black explains. In the past that included members of The Bouncing Souls and Quicksand, but this time around its hardcore heroes Turnstile (who were named after a Hot Water Music song) singer Brendan Yates and Daniel Fang, who contribute to the rhythmically layered rocker “Remnants.”
The album also features Michael “Popeye” Vogelsang (Calling Hours, Farside) doing a spoken word segment on “Wildfire” and Aimee Interrupter and Kevin Bivona of the ska-punk act the Interrupters on “Much Love.” Then there’s the Dallas Green (City And Colour) duet with Ragan on “After The Impossible,” a song that would fit in well on the Warped Tour as it would the WB Television Network. “That song sums up a lot to me of many years with a beautiful partner on the other end of the line holding everything together at home while I’m out with this mission,” Ragan explains. “It’s heavy.”
“For some reason—and maybe because this is such a huge milestone—subconsciously I was thinking, ‘Who knows what is after this?’” he adds. “I would love to say we’re going to keep making music for as long as we’re all around, but the truth is we never know when that’s the last session we do and I feel like I thought of that more than I ever had in the past.” That sentiment is mirrored in the lyrics to the song, which describe a hero’s journey that is still being written. “‘Much Love’ felt crucial to write something like that which just paid homage to everyone who has supported the band over the years,” Ragan says of the album’s closing track, which is a love letter to the community that has allowed Hot Water Music to thrive for the past three decades. “Those people have equally sacrificed spending time, money and energy because they believed in the band and being a part of this family,” he summarizes. “That’s how we’ve always looked at it.”
All five members of the band put everything they had into Vows, an album that is less of a throwback to the past or look to the future as it is a pause in the present moment to acknowledge how far they’ve come.