• News

• All

Oct 22, 2024 By Caleb Campbell

Later this week, New York City-based band Hit is back with their debut full-length album Bestseller, releasing October 25th via One Weird Trick. The band is the project of guitarist and singer Craig Heed, alongside drummer Cameron LeCrone, bassist Charles Mueller, and guitarist Justin Mayfield. Over the past two years, Heed and company have been steadily playing shows around New York in between their trips upstate to Mount Vernon to record Bestseller in Mueller’s newly built studio, Tiny Panther Recording.

Together, they have crafted a series of tracks that veer between jangle pop guitar work and noisy art rock textures, pulling equally from Heed’s ear for nostalgic pop songcraft and the band’s penchant for exploratory song structures. The band have already introduced the album’s sprawling genre experimentations with their lead single, “Nu Jangle,” followed by their latest track, “The Spot.” Today, they’re sharing a final taste of the album with another new track, “Chumbox,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Chumbox” goes in a woozy, psychedelic direction, steeping the vocals and guitars in a haze of dreamy textures. Heed’s vocals drift unmoored above the watery, chiming guitars, conjuring a fuzzy pop sheen colored with swirls of kaleidoscopic effects, winsome vocal melodies, and swooning pop harmonies. However, the choruses send the track plummeting back to Earth, pivoting into a series of instrumental breaks where the band locks together in unison for a jagged descending riff. Later in the track, the band fully dives into psych rock, delivering a fiery, climactic guitar solo before settling into winding, ascending scales. The effect is blissful in one moment and squawking and discordant at the next, encapsulating the adventurous rush at the core of the band’s music.

Heed says of the track, “Chumboxes are those weird grids of clickbait ads that you see at the bottom of NY Post articles, where it’ll be like a stock image of a stack of hundos (‘MONEY MAKING SECRETS THE BANKS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW”\’), next to listicles about the 11 best gifts or warning signs of hypertension or what have you. This was one of the earlier songs written for the album, and the first where I experimented with weirder vocal effects. It’s a fun one live because the choruses are the only moments in our repertoire where we all play the same riff– Charles, Justin, and I on bass and guitars, respectively, and Cameron unisoning on the drums. I’m particularly proud of the little four-part harmony that comes in around the 1:33 mark.”
Check out the song early below. Bestseller is due out on October 25th via One Weird Trick.