Hello Mary - Emita Ox (CD)

Last month saw New York City's Hello Mary return with their first new music, "0%," since the release of their 2023 debut self-titled LP. The song was an immediate hit garnering praise from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Paste Magazine, Brooklyn Vegan and a slew of other publications. Today the band are excited to announce the September 13 release of their new album, Emita Ox, via Frenchkiss Records. On it, the New York City trio of Helena Straight, Stella Wave, and Mikaela Oppenheimer unleash their emotions through their alt-rock anthems like flaming weapons and wield them like proud trophies of their collective tenacity. Since forming in 2019, Hello Mary have ripped into prominence with their fuzzed-out anthems, establishing a darkly playful edge all their own. Possessing a sound that pushes harder into heavy distortion and psychedelic dreamscapes, Emita Ox sees Hello Mary building out their singular universe of gutsy, virtuosic alt-rock. The band co-produced the album alongside Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Indigo De Souza, Wednesday, Snail Mail) in Asheville, NC.

Featuring songs that span from 2018 to 2023, Emita Ox is also a document of Hello Mary's past five years together 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 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." Even if the lyrics touch on serious topics, the band maintains a core sense of play and exploration: jamming is their way of working through these feelings in a way that's "easy and fun," Straight says.

Created amid these emotions of frustration and camaraderie, Emita Ox sees Hello Mary ruthlessly diving into a thrilling sound of catharsis. On "0%," Wave launches into piercing screams for the first time. Oppenheimer says that her bandmate's intense shrieks "makes the song full of energy and really exciting to play," especially in the song's breakdown which ends in a cacophony of noise and vibraphone. Meanwhile, "Down My Life," which Straight says she wrote after "one of the saddest experiences" of her life, features her angelic vowels on top of warped piano and menacing bass. The band even veers towards prog-rock on songs like "Footstep Misstep," where complex instrumentation and Wave's dynamic vocals evoke a world in between fantasy and nightmare.