Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Failure is the secret of Foxing’s success. The St. Louis band’s most popular songs to date are either about romantic rejection or religious trauma, or the indignity of having to relive those indignities onstage, or the financial precarity that comes with reliving those indignities onstage instead of, I dunno, getting a desk job with health benefits. Before the release of 2021’s Draw Down the Moon, drummer Jon Hellwig joked that Foxing might have been better off if the album flopped, giving them an excuse to opt out of emo-indie cult stardom and start playing nu-metal. That didn’t exactly happen, but they made their “Break Stuff” anyway. “Carson MTV! Bizkit NYE! Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuck!” guitarist Eric Hudson shrieks on the priceless chorus of “Hell 99,” a stadium-sized skramz spasm that is arguably the most aggro and the most catchy Foxing song yet, and undeniably the first that sounds like they’re having fun. After a decade shooting for the stars, Foxing is the sound of a band liberated by wallowing in the mud.
By swapping the sounds of Coachella 2012 for Woodstock ’99, “Hell 99” might appear as a course correction for Draw Down the Moon, an album that couldn’t totally beat the Grouplove allegations but had fathoms of dread beneath its Day-Glo exterior. Singer Conor Murphy means to be taken at face value when he blares, “Throw out all the joy and show me metrics for my failures.” But the only major difference between the subject matter of Foxing and its predecessor is that the latter lacked any songs about his dog dying. This album counts at least two.
Think of Foxing as Nearer My God’s evil genius twin: the type that spends more time in detention than study hall and still ends up with an A. Where in the past the band’s experimentalism was anchored by clean, rafter-reaching choruses, Foxing genre-leaps without a net, trusting its weirdest impulses to embellish and deliver the hooks. No spoilers for opener “Secret History”: Just know that by comparison, “Hell 99” is kind of a breather, at least before a refrain of “Constant shame! Constant fatigue!” hyperventilates into an ambient collapse. “Gratitude” is the one Obama-core throwback, performed with a white-knuckled intensity equal to the parts of Foxing that might credibly be compared to Deafheaven, Knocked Loose, and, in the case of “Dead Internet,” a Soundgarden mp3 playing through a dial-up modem.
For 56 minutes Foxing alternately thrills and confounds but provides little in the way of catharsis. No longer daydreaming of planetary apocalypse, Foxing fears not death but dying, the Doomsday Clock that starts up with every morning alarm. The mantras provide grounding and no relief—“You’re on your own”; “Repeat and then repeat, you can never really leave”; “What if it doesn’t matter anymore?” On “Kentucky McDonald’s” the vocal, lead, and rhythm guitar melodies appear to be going in opposite directions, as if drawn and quartered by Nearer My God’s four horsemen. The arrangement turns molten as Murphy sounds like he’s choking on his own blood, but there’s no release, only more tension. Questioning your entire life on a Ronald McDonald bench is not something that should be resolved in four minutes. Murphy likens the Foxing experience to a slow drowning on “Greyhound,” which thrashes to the surface only for him to yell, “It means nothing to me!”
If only. In an interview, Foxing revealed how much they despised each other during the album’s recording, how Hudson spent five days “hate-mixing” a song that he couldn’t wrap his head around and experienced “the darkest fucking thoughts of my life” revisiting The Albatross for adoring crowds in 2023. They don’t give a firm answer as to whether it was all worth it. Foxing concludes with a recording of Hudson at 13, saying to Murphy, “I don’t think the song is as good as it could be, but it’s coming along.” If they could have seen 20 years ahead, would they keep at it? As Murphy sighs during the preceding piano ballad “Cry Baby,” “If I could I’d start over again/It’s been fun but I’d change everything.”
Foxing isn’t a sob story from a band that is, objectively, more successful than most of its peers. Save for a few snapshots from the road, Murphy’s words could be those of a middle school teacher buying their own supplies for the next term, a harried public defender $250,000 in debt, or basically anyone exploited by their idealism long enough to realize salvation isn’t coming. If there were a viral hit or festival booking that could make Foxing feel secure, it probably won’t come from this album. Instead, the meaning comes from the dozens of little moments when they’ve pushed themselves further than they imagined, without promise of any future reward. The days of yelling “I want it all” to an imagined arena audience are gone. Foxing are learning to want what they have.
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When she was still in high school, the artist known as Merce Lemon legally changed her surname to Lemon. That potentially audacious move tells you everything you need to know about the Pittsburgh native’s ear for poetry and absolute confidence in her own vision. That’s “Lemon,” as in the fruit. Go ahead, say it back; run it between your teeth a few times. Even before you hear a single note of her music, you have the sense that she’s only going to do things her way.
That current of surety runs through her folk- and country-tinged new album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, which is warm, rustic, and fundamentally big-hearted—as indebted to softies like Lomelda as to rockers like Neil Young, with Lemon’s unhurried vocals as an anchor. Lemon pulled the title from a (maybe apocryphal) story about an old singer howling at a pack of dogs through his living room window, and wrote the album’s closing track around that idea: a Frank Lloyd Wright-ish melding of indoor and outdoor space, domestic scenes rubbing right up against the wilderness. Here, “lime zest on a bed of leaves” and “thoughts of a husband”—a slow, loping refrain that lends the song its center of gravity—are on equal footing. Lemon is as comfortable writing about frozen creeks and blueberry-laden branches as she is contemplating days spent alone and aimless in her room, staring at a wilting houseplant or tending to her cat, Moldy.
Lemon’s last album, Moonth, tapped into a similar dichotomy but kept things a little livelier, a little more playful. Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is a profoundly sad album. Lemon grew up in a musical household and has said she was influenced from an early age by Kimya Dawson, who even ended up staying on her couch when she came through Pittsburgh. But this new album is less Moldy Peaches or Frankie Cosmos than Hand Habits and Ethel Cain; you’ll find no miniatures here. Lemon is grasping at something big and resonant, something unconstrained by detail. To wit: The songs on Moonth had titles like “Hysterical Clavicle,” “Golden Lady Sauerkraut,” and “Chili Packet.” The tracks on Dogs are called things like “Rain,” “Window,” and “Crow,” and often sprawl out toward the five-minute mark.
Maybe that’s just part of growing up; the vocabulary of whimsy can start to get old when it no longer speaks to your experience. Still, Lemon hasn’t lost her sense of humor. “Rain,” adapted from a friend’s poem about processing flax into linen, opens with a funny juxtaposition of direct and meta imagery:
This sounds like a song
I barfed out in the drought
A love song for the rain
I miss you like the wind hugs wings
It’s one of the album’s least structured songs, and the production is spare under these lilting lines—just a hint of strummed acoustic guitar—but you’d be hard-pressed to find another instance of the word “barf” expressed as sweetly as here.
“Backyard Lover,” a smoldering highlight, builds to one of the album’s purest moments of emotional catharsis, and encapsulates many of its disparate threads. The song peaks with genuine shredding: the ecstatic moment when, over peals of electric guitar, Lemon calls out, “You fucking liar.” This is a track about grief and self-loathing, a reflection on the death of a friend, and there’s an extraordinary depth to the sadness she’s describing. Lemon is angry, but she’s ultimately also resigned. She wants to be alone, but she needs her friends. She’s struggling, but she’s trooping through it. She sounds like a lot of things—which is to say, she sounds like herself.
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