We slept hard on Hembree.
Damn.
Last week we slid a fist in the air and a glass across the table towards SiriusXM AltNation’s Advanced Placement tour, which pairs Los Angeles trio Warbly Jets with London upstarts BLOXX on a cross-country trip across our battered land, arriving at Sonia in Cambridge on June 29. In our hype piece we heralded two of our favorite bangers of 2019 so far: Warbly Jets’ acidic call-to-action anthem “Propaganda” and BLOXX’s propulsive guitar-pop ripper “Sea Blue”.
Little did we know the next entry into our air-tight Best of 2019 list was hidden in plain sight right there on the damn promo flyer. Kansas City’s Hembree, who we gave a simple passing mention of last week, are also this Advanced Placement tour, and their new LP House On Fire, boasts an electronic-rock track called “Culture” that has been reverberating in our glass skulls ever since. The track’s calculated cool and pointed social awareness has not only nodding our heads, but reconsidering what we’re putting into it.
“These days we put so much emphasis on things that lack actual significance,” Hembree guitarist/vocalist Isaac Flynn says of “Culture,” viaBillboard. “Everything is urgent and I wanted to try to capture this urgency in a song and question what we prioritize. It’s about taking the time to stop and reflect; to think for yourself and establish your own opinions.”
Fire it up below. And allow us to sleep on Hembree no more.
