The middle of the organised chaos that is Slam Dunk Festival is where Adam Paduch feels most at home. Coming onstage half an hour late didn’t throw off Heart Attack Man’s drummer in the slightest, and the soft-spoken, very humble punk rocker took it all in his stride. “I think it was technical difficulties in the beginning of the festival, like the first band that played and it pushed everything back. So we had to… ’Spit’, we had to drop that song, so it was a little bit stressful, but I mean festivals are insane. It's just like, we’re trying to do so much, [with] so many moving parts, so you just kind of have to roll with the punches.”
The Hammy Nation, as Heart Attack Man’s fans term themselves, didn’t mind the delay at all, showing up in droves to the Key Club Stage, which Paduch appreciated: “I love it. I think it’s great. I feel very fortunate that people care at all.” Even more impressive is how the Hammy Nation has spread across the globe. Only a few days before Paduch is standing in Hatfield, he’d been on tour in Australia supporting Dear Seattle as part of the growing number of punk bands heading to the Southern Hemisphere. “It was really cool. It was very fun. I mean, it wasn’t the headline or anything,” he says graciously, “but there were definitely like a pocket of people every night that were really… we’ve never been there before. So seeing that so far away, literally the furthest we could possibly be from home, and seeing that was really really cool.” He’s disarmingly open about the difficulties that being constantly on tour brings, which is what you’d expect from a member of a band known for being unflinchingly honest. “It’s rough. It is rough, just trying to communicate with people as much as at home. It’s hard, like today is tough, there’s no cell phone service and like, yeah, it’s definitely rough. Just really trying your best, you know, like trying to make time for people when you’re at home. I have a long distance girlfriend, so like after this I’m like going home for ten hours and flying to go see her and then starting the tour right after I come home. So you just have to like make it work in any way, you know.”
There’s a real sense, if you see Heart Attack Man more than once, that they’re picking up steam with each show. This round, coming straight after the release of ‘Joyride the Pale Horse’, sees Heart Attack Man tackling their relationship with death in all its forms, albeit with a smile on their face and a middle finger in the air. “We always try to do something different,” explains Paduch. “We never want to make the same record twice so we’re constantly trying to push ourselves to do different sounds, do different kinds of songs and so yeah, I would say [our sound is] evolving. I would say it’s gonna be ever-evolving. it’s a never-ending group project.” What stays consistent is the mix of dark, ironic lyrics over some of the jolliest melodies you’ll ever hear, and those two sides are contributed by the individual members. “A lot of the lyrics are Eric [Egan, vocalist for Heart Attack Man]. I do a lot of the imagery and stuff so [we’re] trying to have a mix of both things because I feel like we don’t want anything to be too one-dimensional, you know? That’s not to sound cheesy, but that’s how life is, like good and bad and sad and happy and dark and light so it’s trying to like blend both of those things into everything that we do.”
’Spit’, the first single from ‘Joyride the Pale Horse’, encapsulates this, with a chorus that tells us to “spit in the face of humanity” and a guitar line to get you jumping while you do it. “We didn’t have any like co-writers or anything on that one. That was just one that we went into the studio, Eric had like a riff and I felt the beat and everything like that and it just kind of it came together very very quickly. It was a very organic song.”