Monthly Archives: August 2024

On Emita Ox, Hello Mary push harder into heavy distortion and psychedelic dreamscapes, as they build out their singular universe of gutsy strain of rock. The LP’s labyrinthine production reflects how the band’s musical tastes have expanded from Elliott Smith and Radiohead to encompass experimental post-rock acts like Black Midi and Swans. “This album encompasses a lot of our inspirations,” says Oppenheimer. “It also shows what we’re like as a trio, collectively.”

The project reveals the band levelling up as musicians and composers. Recorded in early 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina, the band played all the instruments on Emita Ox and produced it alongside Alex Farrar (Indigo De Souza, Wednesday, Snail Mail). The members’ contributions to the songwriting and production bleed into each other, but the album is a showcase of their individual strengths: Straight’s ethereal vocal melodies and gritty guitar riffs, Wave’s emotive vocals and knotty drum patterns, and Oppenheimer’s diabolical basslines and experimentation with electronic production. “We map out all the sections beforehand, we like to write intricate parts that complement each other,” says Wave. 

Featuring songs that span from 2018 to 2023, Emita Ox is also a document of Hello Mary’s past five years together growing up as bandmates and their arrival into young adulthood. First meeting as teenagers in 2019, the band became fast friends through the pandemic—a global crisis that made coming of age feel even more weighty and complicated. “This album represents a period of time that’s very meaningful to us. The songs are related to things that we all know about, even if it’s not out on the table for everyone else,” Wave explains. “The songwriting and recording process was a very heavy time that I will never forget.” Even if the lyrics touch on serious topics, the band maintains a core sense of play and exploration: jamming is their way of working through these feelings in a way that’s “easy and fun,” Straight says.

Created amid these emotions of frustration and camaraderie, Emita Ox sees Hello Mary ruthlessly diving into a thrilling sound of catharsis. On “0%,” Wave launches into piercing screams for the first time. Oppenheimer says that her bandmate’s intense shrieks “makes the song full of energy and really exciting to play,” especially in the song’s breakdown which ends in a cacophony of noise and vibraphone. Meanwhile, “Down My Life,” which Straight says she wrote after “one of the saddest experiences” of her life, features her angelic vowels on top of warped piano and menacing bass. The band even veers towards prog-rock on songs like “Footstep Misstep,” where complex instrumentation and Wave’s dynamic vocals evoke a world in between fantasy and nightmare.