Something has quietly shifted for Hot Mulligan. The Michigan five-piece have spent the better part of a decade building one of the most devoted fanbases in modern emo, song by song and tour by tour; the kind of slow-burn ascent that tends to produce rooms that feel less like gigs and more like reunions. ‘The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still’ feels like the moment the rest of the world caught up, a record that arrived fully formed and immediately indispensable and, tonight, the Roundhouse is sold out on a Thursday in March, which is its own kind of statement. There’s a particular breed of Hot Mulligan fans in this building, the kind who can recite the lyrics to songs with titles that read like deleted tweets and feel every word of them as gospel, and there are 3,000 of them here tonight.
Delta Sleep arrive first and waste no time making a case for themselves. The Brighton math-rockers bring a kind of unhurried technical confidence that makes every track feel crowded and cascading in the best possible sense, jazz and alt influence bleeding into one another with an ease that makes the whole thing feel inevitable rather than effortful. The energy is quieter than Oversize’s; more focused, the kind of performance where the music does all the talking and the talking is very good. The crowd eat up every minute of it and by the time they’re done, a room that arrived strangers to them has been thoroughly won over.
And now, Hot Mulligan. ‘Moving to Bed Bug Island’ opens with deceptive calm, the kind of measured intro that lulls you into thinking you might get a minute to breathe before the whole thing detonates. You don’t. ‘And a Big Load’ follows and the Roundhouse barely knows what to do with itself, and from there the room is in freefall in the best possible way. Tades Sanville occupies a very specific Venn diagram overlap between genuinely funny and genuinely devastating, working the crowd between songs with the ease of someone who has been doing this in rooms this size long enough to know exactly when to land a punchline and when to let a song do the heavy lifting. The banter never outstays its welcome because the songs never let it.
A Weezer cover in ‘Island in the Sun’ arrives early and lands with a warmth that briefly turns the Roundhouse into a living room. Then ‘Monica Lewinskibidi’ and ‘How Do You Know It’s Not Armadillo Shells?’ (fan favourite and highlight of the set) instantly make the queuing all worth it. It’s a far cry from playing support slots to a couple of hundred people only a handful of years ago. ‘I Don’t Think It’s the Right Time for Emojis’ is barely three weeks old, a B-side broadside against religious hypocrisy that Tades has described with characteristic bluntness, and yet a startling number of this crowd already know every word. It’s just that kind of fanbase. ‘Featuring Mark Hoppus’ and ‘John “The Rock” Cena, Can You Smell What the Undertaker’ bulldozes through the mid-set with Hot Mulligan’s signature trick of disguising genuinely devastating emotional content inside song titles that sound like they were named by a sleep-deprived teenager on a group chat. ‘Drink Milk and Run’ and ‘Feal Like Crab’ keep the room in a state of near-constant motion, and ‘Gans Media Retro Games’ and ‘Stickers of Brian’ carry the main set toward its close with taut, hard-won momentum.
We’re transported back to the fever dream that was March 2020 with two tracks from ‘You’ll Be Fine’ for the encore. ’BCKYRD’ and ‘*Equip Sunglasses*’ close it out with the kind of volume that makes the Roundhouse’s famous circular walls feel like they’re leaning in.
Hot Mulligan are, and have been for a while, one of the best live bands doing it, and it feels like they are now, at last, getting their flowers.
KATHRYN EDWARDS
