St. Louis Indie Band Hot Joy Release New Single "Leaning"
St. Louis indie rock band Hot Joy returns quickly on the heels of their debut 2024 EP, Small Favor, with two new songs recorded with Melina Duterte of Jay Som. "Leaning" is the second single and is streaming everywhere.
"Leaning" continues the band's collaborative evolution. Lyrically, the song depicts vocalist/bassist Nicole Bonura’s go-to comforts losing their potency. "Leaning" retains Hot Joy's signature levity in the face of exhaustion as vocalist/guitarist Austin McCutchen and Bonura’s intertwined voices allow each personal experience to feel shared.
Hot Joy sounds like a band that was meant to exist. A bold claim, sure, but pair the St. Louis indie quartet’s debut EP Small Favor with the circumstances of its recording and you may reach the same conclusion. Hot Joy’s first release depicted a group remarkably arrived — their Breeders-indebted pop rock crackled with equal parts sweetness and attitude, the singular instrument of guitarist Austin McCutchen and bassist Nicole Bonura’s voices in unison quickly burrowing every melody into the listener’s brain. The songs were confidently spare in their presentation, needing little ornamentation outside of Curt Ochsner’s sinewy guitar lines or Wil McCarthy’s propulsive, muscular drumming. It all belies the truth: they sounded like they’d been playing together for years, but Hot Joy had been a band in earnest for two weeks.
Initially formed from a shared writing practice between McCutchen and Oschner, the two tapped Bonura and McCarthy shortly before heading into the studio to track Small Favor. Inspired by the near-effortless session, the band continued fanning their spark by meeting weekly to begin writing collectively for the first time, testing the mettle of their new compositions onstage via a slew of onstage opportunities afforded them by their status as veteran St. Louis musicians. The season culminated in a band outing to Los Angeles to record with Melina Duterte (Jay Som), a trip that for McCutchen “as much like a team bonding experience as it was a recording.” Duterte’s salt-sprayed, widescreen production and hometown hero Eric Hudson’s (Foxing) layer-heavy mix are a perfect pairings with a band broadening both the dimensions of their sound and their relationships to one another, seeing Hot Joy threading vulnerability into their salty-sweet interplay. “Quality Control” finds McCutchen spun out in a bowling alley bathroom as a mushroom-assisted attempt to mitigate social anxiety goes awry, “Leaning” depicts Bonura’s go-to comforts losing their potency, gummy worms all “tast[ing] like gasoline.” Both retain the band’s signature levity in the face of exhaustion, McCutchen and Bonura’s intertwined voices allowing each deeply personal experience to feel shared.
“These songs feel a little more mature, a little more grown up,” McCutchen says. “This is what it sounds like for all four of us to have our minds equally in the pot.” He tells me about the tools Hot Joy is discovering, the range of possibilities afforded them by their collaboration as a unit. He doesn’t have to — that ball has been rolling downhill from the jump.
