Happy Hump Day music fans,
Welcome back to Asheville Week.
The most successful bands are full of talent that was developed from hard work.
Paul McCartney wasn’t born knowing how to sing, play piano, bass, and guitar. He had to work hard and learn.
And the members of hug aren’t any exception.
Founded last year, hug released a new album in May. Their members — Rebecca ‘Bex’ Vines, J.J. Storniolo, and Mike Holmes— had to play musical chairs to make hug work.
Although they’re pretty new, hug already has three items in their discography. Talk about being prolific.
Join me in giving a hug for hug!
The Riff: How did hug start and when did it happen?
J.J.: I recently moved here and met Bex.
She recorded Separation of the Memory and asked if I could throw drums and keys on it and then I wrote Bedside soon after.
We wanted to play live so we woodshed with a couple drummers till we met Mike.
Mike: I was super into what they had going on and dug playing with them so it stuck.
Bex: J.J. and I did those demo recordings around February 2019. A couple months later is when we met Mike, and then started playing live a little after that.
The Riff: Can you tell us about your journey from recording demos to playing live? How did you first book live shows and how often did you perform live in 2019?
Bex: We were asked to play a house show in South Carolina with our friends in a folk duo called cowbaby. It was our first show, which was a really sweet and supportive environment. Usually we’d play about two shows a month with touring bands, but sometimes I think that number even hit four times a month before.
The Riff: Would you say that any of your friends who you’ve performed with influenced your music? If not, then who has?
J.J.: I’d say like every band here in Asheville has influenced me. From the noise crowd to the indie players to just everyone. I tried to soak it all up being new here.
Mike: There feels like a lot of back and forth between us as far as influencing each other, if anyone influences me in relation to hug that’s Will Younts, Colin Barrett, Landon George, and Andy Loebs.
Bex: We have randomly been put on noise bills before — which has been interesting and definitely influential. We sometimes have elements of difference in our playing through our introduction of different instruments and synths for shows on occasion.
The Riff: How do you create your music? Do one of you write something, then share it, and work with it? Are you all together? How does it work?
J.J.: It’s basically that. I’ll write a skeleton and we will bring it to life, together, and make our parts.
Mike: Early on Bex and J.J. would have ideas of how drums should go and I’d emulate that. Then it became more collaborative and reflected more accompaniment between instruments.
The Riff: You talk about having different elements in your music — can you point me to specific songs and which elements they had?
Mike: With the single Glitterthere’s different marked elements. The time signature of the main riff is in seven and sounds like halftime math rock. Whereas the bridge, the drums become dragged out like neo-soul or lo-fi hip hop. J.J. and I always get weird and weave around each other while Bex croons.
Because of You is also really quirky, it has quick mathy, twinkly elements, and sections that are very soulful and slow. Dynamics are really important to us, especially in relation to a song’s subject matter and the emotions associated with such.
J.J.: I couldn’t have said it better.
The Riff: Math rock is something we’ve been hearing a lot in our Asheville interviews. What is math rock and why should we listen to it?
J.J.: Math rock, in its rawest term, is post rock music played in odd meters like five or 7 one so on.
The song structures are usually different than a normal song. While some would have a b a b c song structure and things would repeat, math rock doesn’t really repeat itself. From point A to Z or anywhere in between. I’ve always been drawn to the song structures. They say the guitar is played with angularity and the drummer has to really be on their game as a player and definitely play out of the box to relay the message across.
Then there’s math rock that repeats a lot and is very simplistic, but they still play in odd meters. So what’s cool about that is that everyone’s parts begin to phase in and out of each other.
Also the content is usually very emotional and raw.
Mike: It definitely has become an influence for 20-somethings around here and just abroad. But as J.J. said, there are definitely different subgenres or types of math rock. Stuff like Hella is more frenetic, whereas math rock like Slint — who are considered pioneers — is markedly different from Hella.
The Riff: It’s clear that you incorporate all of these elements that, as you said best, are quirky but fun to listen to.
A subject we’ve always been interested in is how artists choose the order of songs in their discography.
How does hug go about such an endeavor? Do you pay close attention to aligning the track order based on elements? Other attributes?
Bex: I think it’s important to space out songs that are more similar than to group them together. I prefer to have more variety in the difference, since I feel like it keeps the listener a little more on their toes.
However I could see why some artists would choose to group together similar songs, since it would potentially act more like a smooth storyline.
The Riff: You have quite the intriguing album art, as a techie I particularly liked the cover for where’s my. What were you thinking when making the covers for both that and glitter?
Bex: I think I wanted the cover for where’s my to just be cute. I just went on a website that has the old version of Microsoft Paint and drew the first thing that came to mind.
For glitter, J.J. and I realized the night we were going to release the single that we didn’t even think about an image to go with it. So we just got some glitter paint and glitter we had laying around and tried to think of objects in our house to write ‘hug’ on and settled on my last piece of bread.
J.J.: That’s how the magic’s made.
The Riff: Let’s talk about your new album. What should we expect from it? Will you be doing anything for the album — such as a livestream performance?
Mike: There are seven songs, including an interlude.
For people who’ve heard us live or have seen footage, I think there’ll be some surprises as far as textures we added to the mix that speak to our varying musical and cultural influences — from anime to electronic music.
Our loose, fun, and chaotic energy we perform with is not absent from the record either — which can sometimes be lost when bands get into the studio and record an album.
As far as a livestream I don’t think we’d be opposed, but we haven’t really discussed it with the overall volatility of everyday life this past month.
J.J.: I’d say every song is a little different, too as we grew together as a band.
The Riff: What are some of the differences between hug’s early days versus today? What have each of you learned from your experiences working together?
Mike: I think the biggest difference is we grew to be close friends through this band. We knew each other before from being in the scene, but not like we know each other now. So pretty much every facet of playing together was fortified with cultivating that friendship.
As far as what I’ve learned, playing with hug has taught me to not take myself too seriously. It reminded me that a huge part of collaborating with others is humility and understanding your role and excelling at it whether you’re doing the most or the least.
Bex: We all took a step out of our comfort zones with our respective instruments, too. We were always trying something new. And, like Mike said, we grew closer from playing with each other which makes performing more comfortable because you all want each other to succeed. We just get to let loose together a little more on stage.
J.J.: In the beginning hug was like an idea of some lo-fi bedroom pop thing that was really just a recording project. And now we’ve seen our personalities as songwriters take the band and it sort of grew that way.
The more comfortable we are with each other, the deeper we get with hug. It keeps getting better. It’s been better to watch it take its course between us then try to fit it in a box.
The Riff: You learned a lot from trying new things and being experimental. Can you elaborate more on this?
Bex: For me, I never played bass in a band before hug so I was just taking what I knew from guitar and trying to figure out what would add the most dynamic to the song. We have a lot of time changes in our music which is a challenge that I felt helped me improve as a musician in general.
J.J.: I never played keyboard in a band before. So doing that, plus singing, plus harmonizing was all pretty new to me.
Mike: We all have different musical backgrounds that vary and marry. If we’re writing something new, it’s usually a pretty open process when building upon the song and creating new parts. Our various influences shine in different spots through those moments and sometimes they’re subtle and sometimes they’re not.
I hadn’t messed with modular synth stuff before this band and getting to implement the werkstatt during recording — and during one show — was super fun.
The Riff: Let’s talk about your listeners. How did you get your current listeners for hug — digitally and in person? And how do they get to interact with your band?
Mike: Probably at first, just the amount of connections throughout the scene and the popularity of other projects, we have brought people to our shows and we gained a good following through that.
We were also quick on having a band page on Instagram to help promote and create what we’re known for aesthetically. And it’s helped to have some sort of following already before releasing our debut because plenty of people have asked me since almost last year when there was going to be more hug music to listen to online.
Our interaction with fans has been mostly at shows we play or attend. Or through our Instagram and Bandcamp.
J.J.: We all had other projects that are more of our individual things before this. I think that brought a lot of different types of people to our pool.
The Riff: Let’s discuss overlap of fan bases based on influence.
Clearly your music — particularly your new album — is influenced by a lot of cultural phenomena, whether it’s anime, electronic music, etc.
Do people who like each niche that we discussed tend to like the same music? Particularly yours? Or are they different folks — as in, those who like electronic music and anime are different people — that you have to bring together?
Mike: It seems that there is an overlap in those two interests. I think it more has to do with the never ending amount of information and access to such that dictates how millennials and Gen Z’ers are influenced culturally.
You can find a platform for even the most localized subgenres of music nowadays, and that’s really important for those who create electronic music that isn’t mainstream or follows pop structures. Same goes for what we digest on television. Streaming makes it where you can watch about anything there is to watch or have access to it. Not all of the anime and media I watch now was something I could access in the early days of the Internet and being a kid.
So there’s probably a correlation. But people being able to dig deeper and reach farther into what they like and what is related to it changes the game.
The Riff: We discussed past live performances already — but what are you expecting for the future of hug? Any grand ambitions for this year and beyond?
J.J.: That first question is a big one for sure. I think here in Asheville there’s a lot of split up between genres and just groups of people. Sometimes, sadly, it seems like a popularity contest. Other times it’s people who truly love the music.
I think we all grew up on anime so there’s like a little staple there for everyone since we all got to watch Toonami and all that. I don’t see a lot of the punk crowd go out of their way for any other genre sometimes.
We were supposed to tour in like five days but you know everything started to get cancelled. Hopefully, I don’t know we could tour again maybe in the fall. The future looks so hazy with talk of there being a second more powerful wave of the virus circulating around when it gets cold again.
A music video would be nice.
Bex: I think we would like to eventually do a tour, which we were going to do pre-COVID, but weren’t able to because of the situation. So, I think that would be the first goal.
J.J.: I even got a new van and everything.
You’ll probably get another bulk of recorded songs from us toward the end of the year. Since this is more of a collaboration effort it’s been tough to get the ball rolling but I’ve definitely been working on my skills so we can hit the ground running.
Interview edited for clarity and concision.