Interview
Interview
Hot Milk: “the best thing you can do is start a conversation”
Han Mee and Jim Shaw of Hot Milk talk changing hearts and minds ahead of their homecoming second album
Han Mee was done with being introspective. She and Hot Milk co-conspirator Jim Shaw had already excavated enough pain on their 2023 debut album, A Call To The Void, which captured the exhaustion, burnout and mental strain they’d endured as touring ground their spirits down to nibs. “I kept hearing my dad echoing in my mind, being like, ‘Pull your socks up and pack it in’,” she jokes. Since then, she did the work on herself, took stock of their blossoming fortunes as a band, and felt her once-depleted tank fill up again. Now, the pair of them – alongside bassist Tom Patton and drummer Harry Deller – are fighting back.
“I’m much more effective in the finite lifespan I have being someone that can look outwards and see what I can change about the world rather than it just being all about me,” she considers. “I’ve got to be efficient with the time I have on planet Earth. For me, it’s about looking outward and seeing the things that are wrong in society and not necessarily having the answers, but having a conversation.”
Almost two years on from their debut, the Salford quartet stand on the precipice of releasing the fiercely political, yet curious and observant, follow-up, Corporation P.O.P. Its multifaceted title riffs on “corporation pop”, Han’s granddad’s nickname for tap water, but turns the second word into an acronym meaning ‘payment of pain’, referring to the commodification of pain under capitalism. Of course, what is political is often simultaneously personal, but that resonates on a different level for someone like Han who wasn’t just raised on political punk music – Green Day, Operation Ivy, Dead Kennedys, the works – but connected with it so strongly it practically seeped into her bloodstream. “It’s in my DNA to write music like that,” she says. It even inspired her to study politics at university.
At times, it imagines mushroom clouds rising in the sky. Lead single ‘90 Seconds To Midnight’ bristles with energy and anxiety as they watch the doomsday clock tick down, while follow-up ‘Swallow This’ attacks information overload in the poisonous post-truth era. Other times, it looks inside the kitchens and back gardens of ordinary working-class England, while also glancing with scorn towards the Houses of Parliament. Once again, they’re bringing the personal and political together, for a record which, fundamentally, is about their home.
Hot Milk get to see their home country from a different vantage point. As deeply connected as they are to their roots in the north of England, they also spend substantial portions of it in planes and on foreign roads on tour. At one point not so long ago, Han was living in Los Angeles – where they worked on the album with producers Zach Jones and KJ Strock – and was contemplating staying permanently, but later made a sharp U-turn.
“People who want to be someone go there. People who already are someone don’t go there,” she theorises. “I think people go there because they think that it’s going to be the place that things happen for them. But I actually discovered that nothing happens in LA. It’s just where a lot of people who are very insecure go, and I don’t think that it’s actually conducive to creating good art. I think LA is very safe. I think it’s actually the antithesis of creativity.”
Jim agrees. “When you’ve got these dreams as a kid, you see all your favourite bands and all your favourite records coming out of this place, and you hold it to such a high esteem. It’s always glorified in the media. It still has a place in our hearts but we’ve grown out of it a bit. The blinkers have come off.”
“I didn’t laugh once when I lived there,” adds Han, “because no-one’s funny.”
Furthermore, England might be in a strange, static state of managed decline, but they noticed that America was rotting at a faster rate. It ends up in Hot Milk’s crosshairs on Corporation P.O.P within the scathing recent single ‘The American Machine’. “I’ve seen parts of the country that are terrifying,” points out Han. A few weeks prior to our interview, the band had been in Portland, Oregon, facing dystopian scenes of mass homelessness as a result of the US government throwing its citizens to the wolves. “They’ve given up on the city.”
They dug their feet back into home soil, both asking questions of, and embracing the culture of, the oftentimes grey and unpleasant land of England. Their music videos were shot around Salford, while the artwork, featuring a bin on fire, was shot in Jim’s back alley. “Why go to far away lands when we have what we need here?” he says. “Our home has given us our lives.” Meanwhile, Han identifies an aspect of maturity to them touching base with their home country again. “As you get older, you stop running away from where you came from as much. Thailand do it better, obviously, because they’re Buddhist and have beautiful beaches, but as far as the Western world goes, I think we’ve got it pretty well worked out here. People take it for granted an awful lot.”
Of course, we have things to be angry about – the threat to the future of the NHS, the ruin left behind by austerity that isn’t being repaired, a dangerous, increasing appetite for transphobia. Hot Milk are angry about them too. “We’re moving towards an American model. America is a social experiment – why are we looking at them?” Han questions. But, at the same time, they search for the joy, whether it’s in the warehouse raves they frequent (the subject of album track ‘Warehouse Salvation’), the British sense of humour, the simple pleasures of a cup of tea or, as ‘Insubordinate Ingerland’ references, mushy peas. “We laugh at ourselves here,” Han says. “We have a really unique point of view and a really unique way of getting on.”
Hot Milk are watching their corner of the world – “say what you see,” as Jim puts it – but they’re observing rather than necessarily trying to project an opinion. What they want from this is both catharsis and conversation, whether it’s between people who might consider themselves ‘on the same side’, or those who are reaching across dividing lines of class, age or political stance.
“The best thing you can do is start a conversation – it doesn’t have to end, with both sides agreeing,” acknowledges Jim. “But I feel like the real danger is when you don’t have these conversations, you don’t listen to people’s opinions and experiences, then the world becomes more insular.”
“No one ever listens to anything that they’re being shouted at for,” adds Han. “You have to find a middle ground, and you have to find a way of communicating with people, because if you do that, you’re more likely to find yourself on the same page.”
Hot Milk play Glasgow, London, Birmingham and Manchester this November. Find Hot Milk tickets here
Corporation P.O.P is out now, available to stream and buy here
Photo by Sergione Infuso/Corbis via Getty Images
