With Hovvdy’s newest release Taster, set to come out tomorrow April 15 through Merdurhaus and Sports Days Records, we think it’s safe to say that the current upsurge of on-point slacker rock in Austin has its figurehead act. So far we’ve only got three tracks from the album, but they are strong in the slack, as oxymoronic as that might sound.
Taster is Hovvdy building upon their recent work with last year’s Stay Warm split with Loafer (which we loved), adding to the already-present 90s slacker indie sound, a la Pavement and the like, a further depth to their work that puts us more in mind of the softer 2000s suburban indie pop of bands like Pinback. It’s good, introspective, happy-in-its-melancholy music, full of prettily muted vocals and quiet thoughts on relationships like good slack should be.
Personally, it makes me think of a time when the world you could reach out to was smaller, so you dicked around in the space available in your own town, very often listening to music with a feel just like this and thinking about how weird everything felt all the time. That there are bands making a sound that feels as much of that time as it does of now makes me happy, and thoughtful. Maybe we aren’t that far from that kind of life when the world we could interact with was smaller and so each of our relationships was more complex. Or maybe we just wish we were still there.
Whichever it is, Hovvdy is here to talk about it. Check out track “Try Hard” from Taster below, and be sure that we’ll be giving the full album a look here soon.