With the release of last year’s sophomore, self-titled album, New York-based indie rock trio Hello Mary — Helena Straight, Stella Wave and Mikaela Oppenheimer — received praise nationally from the likes of Rolling Stone, who wrote that the album was “one of 2023’s sharpest, nosiest debuts.”
Building upon a growing profile, the New York-based trio’s highly-anticipated, Alex Farrar and band co-produced third album Emita Ox will be released September 13, 2024 through Frenchkiss Records. Emita Ox sees the rising New York-based trio pushing harder into heavy dissertation and psychedelic dreamscapes, while they build out their singular universe rooted in a gusty strain of alternative rock. The album also reflects how the band’s musical tastes have expanded from Elliott Smith and Radiohead to encompass experimental post-rock acts like Black Midi and Swans. “This album encompasses a lot of our inspirations,” Hello Mary’s Mikaela Oppenheimer says. “It also shows what we’re like as a trio, collectively.”
Recorded earlier this year, the album’s material reveals a band that’s boldly leveling up as musicians and composers. The trio’s contributions to the material’s creation and production bleed into each other, but the album is also a showcase of their individual strengths and abilities: Straight’s ethereal vocal melodies and gritty guitar riffs, Wave’s emotive vocals and knotty drum patterns, and Oppenheimer’s diabolical basslines and experimentation with electronic production. “We map out all the sections beforehand, we like to write intricate parts that complement each other,” Hello Mary’s Stella Wave says.
Featuring songs that span from 2018 to 2023, the album is also a document of the band’s past five years growing up as bandmates and their arrival into young adulthood. First meeting as teenagers in 2019, the band became fast friends through the pandemic – a global crisis atop a series of crises that made coming of age feel even more weighty and complicated. “This album represents a period of time that’s very meaningful to us. The songs are related to things that we all know about, even if it’s not out on the table for everyone else,” Wave explains. “The songwriting and recording process was a very heavy time that I will never forget.” Although the lyrics touch on serious topics, the band maintains a core sense of play and exploration” jamming is their way of working through difficult and heavy feelings in a way that’s “easy and fun,” Straight says.
Created amid emotions of frustrations and camaraderie, the album finds the trio fearlessly diving into catharsis.
The album’s first single “0%” features thunderously percussive, down-tuned bass, distortion pedaled guitar fuzz, forceful drumming and Stella Wave’s throaty, feral screams within a classic grunge song structure of alternating impossibly loud choruses, quieter verses and a mischievously dreamy breakdown with vibraphone and triangle.
Much like the rest of the album, the song emerged as the trio were jamming in their practice space. After quickly becoming a crowd favorite live, the song really came to live in the studio, becoming the first time that the band’s Stella Wave had screamed on the recording. When she hopped into the recording booth, she felt emboldened to draw out the vocal shouts the band had originally planned, turning them into much longer screams.
The new single emerged as the trio were jamming in their practice space. After quickly become a crowd favorite live, the song really came to life in the studio, becoming the first time that the band’s Stella Wave had ever screamed on a recording. But when she hopped into the recording booth, she felt emboldened to draw out the vocal shouts the band originally planned, turning them into much longer screams.
The song captures a young woman boldly and defiantly expressing existential frustrations — and getting a bit of joy out of the fact of what little she knows and how much she has left to learn.
Emita Ox‘s third and latest single, the brooding “Down My Life” features Helena Straight’s angelic delivery ethereally floating over a Tool-meets-OK Computer-era Radiohead like arrangement of forceful and menacing down-tuned bass, bursts of warped piano, shimmering strummed guitar within a slightly expansive yet classic grunge song structure.
“Down My Life,” is a song that Straight says she wrote after “one of the saddest experiences” of her life. She adds, that “‘Down My Life’ is possibly the most lyrically powerful song for me on the record. The lyrics are somewhat vague, so the meaning behind it is not totally obvious to the listener, which is how I’d like it to be considering the state I was in when I wrote it.”
