I’ll call Microwave’s fourth album by its actual name just once and honor frontman Nathan Hardy’s desire to have everyone else just use the acronym going forward. “We just love drugs,” he deadpans without irony or scandal, as to be expected from someone who slipped a fairly straightforward cover of “Santeria” onto Let’s Start Degeneracy as a hidden bonus track. But really, acid is notably one of the substances that didn’t go into the making of LSD – inspired by an ayahuasca retreat in Peru, written with the help of Adderall, nootropics, and opening the subconscious with a really, really good shit. “A good probiotic goes a long way,” drummer Timothy “Tito” Pittard jokes.
Besides, drugs are one of the few throughlines in the Atlanta band’s strange, slow trajectory towards the upper-middle class of…whatever we’re calling this overlap of emo, pop-punk, and alt-rock nowadays. The core trio of Hardy, Pittard, and bassist Tyler Hill initially toughed it out in the southern DIY circuit playing a sort of skramz/twinkle hybrid – “Cap’n Jazz to American Football to Saetia and Pg. 99-type stuff” Hardy explains. In other words, they were a quintessential, early-2010s emo revival band. By 2014’s Stovall, Hardy mostly dropped the screaming and Microwave took on a more robust, accessible sound that wed spiritual turmoil to occasional arena-emo grandeur; a promising prospect for Manchester Orchestra and Brand New fans who still sorta missed the way those bands sounded in 2009.
Stovall had some good hooks, none better than Hardy’s story of leaving Mormonism in his early 20s and making up for lost time. “These drugs will be the death of us/at least whatever’s left of us,” he sang on the title track, while two of the best songs on the follow-up Much Love were titled “Roaches” and “Vomit.” That alone should give you a sense of the subject matter, though “Wrong” is actually the one about chain-smoking blunts.
Microwave spent Much Love getting even deeper their vices while leveling up, part of a bumper SideOneDummy class of 2016 that included PUP, Jeff Rosenstock, AJJ, and Chris Farren. Even if they got to play Warped Tour and open for Jimmy Eat World, two straight years of running through songs like “Dull,” “Wrong,” “Whimper” and “Drown” every night still left Hardy nearly broke and totally broken – the medical bills were piling up, the drugs weren’t working, the sex wasn’t working, and Microwave’s once tightly-knit scene was turning on each other. It seems like the only thing Hardy could look forward to was the sweet release of the afterlife and all of that got channeled into 2019’s Death Is A Warm Blanket. “Hate TKO”? That’s a good song right there.
Hardy envisioned a follow-up that went in an even darker direction, but found himself too depressed by his own music to find inspiration for lyrics. “During the pandemic, we had played around with doing even heavier songs than the last record, and those songs weren’t really getting completed,” Hardy sighs. But in shifting their focus towards a more wavy, R&B-influenced tone equally by Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Foxing’s Blonde-indebted masterpiece Nearer My God, Microwave knocked out singles “Circling the Drain” and “Straw Hat” in short order – both of which quickly became live staples and fan favorites. “Everything felt like it was falling into place,” Hardy recalls. “Like, ‘‘I think this is what we’re meant to do at this time.’”
Nearly five years after Death Is A Warm Blanket, Microwave launched LSD with “Bored Of Being Sad” – though perhaps a bit shinier than their past work, it’s a sound and sentiment that could’ve fit on Much Love or Death Is A Warm Blanket. But on those albums, people who were bored of cursing the dark were more likely to spark a blunt than light the proverbial candle. Hardy had experimented with nearly all of the best-known narcotic acronyms, but never PMA. “People who are happy often just make a conscious choice to be happy,” Hardy muses. “And a lot of that is, ‘fake it till you make it,’ the things you say out loud just becomes your reality.”
Microwave had been releasing standalone singles for nearly two years before Let’s Start Degeneracy was announced, was there a point where you questioned whether you’d put out a full-length album again?
Nathan Hardy: We had actually talked about just releasing singles, but I think that people in this realm of music like albums and it gives an opportunity for a PR push and narrative surrounding a larger release. We had one album left on our deal with Pure Noise, plus we had also publicly implied that we were gonna be doing a whole record, so we were just like, “let’s hash it out.” But if “Circling The Drain” hadn’t done as well as it did – it became a crowd favorite live and it streamed really well – we may have been reconsidering whether we should just put out more singles. Instead, it was, “let this be the blueprint of a general direction.”