Mallory Hawk takes a bouncy new wave detour on “Superhighway”

On the first playthrough of Hawk’s debut solo record, it’s impossible to predict the shiny post-punk of “Superhighway” in the tracklist. Opening cuts like “The Mirror” are owed to cathartic slowcore, plus there’s the fingerpicking Americana of “Four O’Clocks”, and even egg punk on “Caretaker”. A galloping bassline that drives The Cure-like “Superhighway” will catch anyone off guard.

The effortlessly replayable tune came from Hawk’s reinvigorated new wave phase during the pandemic. “My friend Joe Sutkowski from Dirt Buyer sent me a video of the band Alyans performing on Soviet public access television in the ’80s,” she recalls. “I wanted to support musicians the best way I could, so I was ordering a lot of cassettes from Russia and Belarus.” One may expect the song was first written with synthesisers, but that’s not true. “I was using my guitar in a synth style and layering the song until it turned into the dance hit that I wanted it to be,” Hawk explains with a laugh.

Her guitar and rock music, broadly, are the main through lines that give Chinook its eclectic sonic identity. For Hawk, that passion stems from multiple times in her life. During childhood, she listened to a lot of country radio, and her dad likened her earliest guitar-playing to Lynyrd Skynyrd. When she lived in New York, she was exposed to lots of indie rock and punk. “I like punk that’s very dancey and very classically political, and it’s not super mysterious,” she says. “I like my punk to be really fun.” That’s not surprising given her presence in the New York post-punk band Customer. Even her whole family enjoys “a bit of weird guitar music,” with her brother a metalhead and her mom also loving new wave.

Hawk’s chameleonic artistry is no a gimmick; rather an earnest exploration of who she is holistically. Chinook is a diaristic album, from her childhood in the North Carolina military town of Fayetteville up to now, Hawk is reckoning with her identity. “I’ve never been able to really convey it clearly, and I just have a better handle on my own songwriting,” she says. A lot of thought was put into Chinook’s sequencing because people misconstruing the record as “all over the place” was a concern. “If I really packed the punk at the front, people would be like, ‘Okay, this is a punk record.’ If they gave up by track three, they’d never know that it wasn’t a punk record.” Chinook is instead a tapestry of Hawk as a multifaceted person, and her introspection is soundtracked to songs echoing everyone’s favourite guitar bands.

For the longest time, though, a debut album wasn’t on Hawk’s mind. “I’m really happy I’ve made it, but the life I really wanted for myself was to just be in a band,” she admits. “I wanted it to be less about my identity.” That’s why she first learned the drums, so she could rock and let the emotions out. In her years working in the music industry and playing in other bands, she’d write songs in her head, and once she taught herself how to use Logic, being a solo artist slowly became a tangible goal. “It was the most exciting thing to me to make sense of all these ideas and put them to paper,” Hawk recalls. So, to achieve that, she “had to step to the forefront to get that control.”

It understandably took a long time; leaving the protective shield of a band for the spotlight is daunting and leads to all kinds of negative inner dialogue. In a way, Hawk really made Chinook for herself, proving that she could write songs and see herself as an artist. Like-minded industry friends were unsure and shocked that she decided to take the solo route, knowing how hard the process is, but Hawk offers an empowering clap back: “Even if no one likes it, I’m going to go to my grave being like, ‘I’m so glad that I know I did it.’”

Also of note is Hawk’s return to Fayetteville while recording Chinook, which served as a full-circle moment of recognising her identity. “I was in this unique scenario where I had left my hometown when I turned 18, and I didn’t really return at all,” she says. “I lived a completely different lifestyle.” Naturally, it was stifling when she’d pass buildings such as churches she went to as a kid, given she completely “resents” the “Southern Christian military heteronormative [ideals]” of the city. “I was having to confront that stuff head-on. It was a mixture of anger, suppression, and reflection.”

For instance, “Low Rise” was written about religious suppression. “I wanted it to feel so angsty because it has a teenage rage behind it,” Hawk reveals. “Four O’Clocks” is her anger directed to the military for demolishing her childhood home: “I was angry at my town for not letting me be who I wanted to be.”

Creating Chinook has ultimately given Hawk a deeper understanding of who she is: “The output from that is actually quite delicate, you know? I think that means I have maybe accepted my identity and really started to grow from that.” There’s so much life experience poured into these songs, at times sounding tender or furious, but their variety symbolises the many paths it takes to become self-assured. Hawk, now a confident artist, sincerely shows us all of that. “Processing all that stuff through song really softened me on myself and my upbringing.”