From West Sussex
Recommended if you like Hole, the White Stripes, the Breeders
Up next Debut album and a UK tour
The members of the rock trio HotWax attest that their 2023 has been “crazy”. At the start of the year, they had never even been on tour. When I speak to them, they have just returned from a month playing around the US. “It blew our minds,” enthuses the vocalist and guitarist Tallulah Sim-Savage. “Even though the drives were really long, it was like watching a 12-hour film of some interesting scenery.”
They spent the summer playing festivals. They went to Italy at the behest of One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson for his Away from Home festival, played Reading and Leeds and – most surreally of all for HotWax – supported Yeah Yeah Yeahs at All Points East. “My favourite band,” nods Sim-Savage. “My dream band to support, so I was terrified, but I really just let go and enjoyed the experience.” The feeling appeared to be mutual: when Yeah Yeah Yeah played Maps, Karen O dedicated it to them.
They have released two acclaimed EPs and been heralded as part of a new wave of incendiary guitar bands, including Spiritual Cramp, Lambrini Girls and Duvet. If you are looking for a vague pointer towards their raging sound, Sim-Savage has previously credited the sound of her mum playing Hole’s Live Through This as “the thing that changed everything”.
Things seem to be moving very fast, but as the bassist Lola Sam points out, it has been a long time coming. She and Sim-Savage have been in bands together since they were 13; they started HotWax two years later, in 2019. They gigged around their native Hastings, performing largely improvised and instrumental sets of what Sam calls “wishy-washy psychedelia” (the kind of music, Sim-Savage suggests, that you might make if “you’re 15 and in Covid and smoking loads of weed”), before their style took a turn. “Everything is more organised now,” says Sam. “It’s more structured. It became more heavy and more poppy at the same time.”
They found their drummer, Alfie Sayer, while studying at the music college Bimm in Brighton. His recruitment aside, their tenure there doesn’t sound like it was a roaring success: Sam lasted a term (“it was very much, like, jazz boys who wanted to play like that”). They dropped out, self-released singles and played “wherever would have us”, but by Sim-Savage’s reckoning they “didn’t really know what we were doing” until they met their manager, whose suggestion that they could “actually try and do this properly” so startled the band that Sim-Savage initially turned her down. “We never did this to do really well or whatever,” she frowns. “It’s just something we really, really enjoyed doing.”
And yet they are clearly doing really well, offering a fierce counterargument to the long-held wisdom that noisy guitar rock has had its day. “I think it’s got something to do with Covid,” says Sam. “Bands were on the rise, then had to stop deciding to really go for it. People were stuck in for so long. Now, they’re like: no, we’ll just do what we want to do when we have the chance.”
