On their tangy and refreshing new record Alpha Hex Index, Buffalo, New York’s Alpha Hopper sound wild yet exuberant. On the album — a Nov. release from Hex Records — Alpha Hopper perform raw and noisy rock that centers on powerfully direct rhythms and overflows with vibrant bursts of energy that temporarily send the music spiraling into cathartically unhinged territory.
“I really think that we are probably Buffalo, New York’s premier jam band,” Alpha Hopper drummer Douglas Scheider shares. “Like, there’s an hour of every band practice where we’re just sitting there noodling around, doing whatever, getting weird — and we almost never use that material, but it’s sort of just like this musical conversation we have, sort of getting out a lot of the not-songwriting stuff. We don’t do a lot of unintentional music-writing. […] All four of us, I think, are very detail-focused people — in our professions, we have our lawyer, we have our graphic designer. We have very driven, very focused people, who are trying to cut loose. I feel like we want to be this cool, sloppy band, but we’re all a little too serious and a little too cerebral, so you get this weird dialogue, where it’s like we just let whatever happens happen and then get it back together and pick it apart and critique each other.”
Alpha Hex Index definitely feels like letting loose — and at the same time, Alpha Hopper display serious rock chops. Their rhythmic strength gives them the platform to leap into their swirling pools of musical zaniness. From the noisily wistful opening track “In The Desert In The West” to the jittery yet vibrant “Glows, Explodes,” Alpha Hopper consistently keep their energy up. The record feels like a turbulent plane ride through a colorfully convulsing storm.
The members of Alpha Hopper — including Scheider, Ryan McMullen and John Toohill on guitars, and Irene Rekhviashvili on vocals — draw from a strikingly diverse palette of inspiration for their music. The music reflects this vibrant diversity: Rekhviashvili’s caustic vocals sound reminiscent of riot grrrl punk, and on a few short tracks, ominous electronica takes over as if suddenly flipping into a sci-fi thriller.
The group’s songwriting experience generally feels rather cohesive, McMullen shares.
“I think we’re kind of crafting every song together, as a real group dynamic, and I think that’s why, when it gets to actual songwriting and not just goofing around and jamming, we kind of are always just working as this finely oiled machine to make whatever it is we have into something good, you know?”
This group dynamic assists with the smooth incorporation of the band members’ diverse backgrounds, McMullen adds.
“I think for us, doing this sort of business-as-usual approach to songwriting and then recording an album whenever we reach that critical mass of material allows for those influences or whatever’s going on with us personally at the time to kind of shine through subconsciously,” he observes, explaining that he doesn’t personally like to write “too intentionally” while crafting songs.
“Rather than doing it intentionally at the outset, it’s sort of like: well, we were into all of this shit at the time we were writing these songs, and it’s sort of like a document or a time capsule of where we were at that given time.”
McMullen calls the group’s latest record “definitely different,” adding: “It just was sort of happening. We were writing all of these metallic-sounding riffs, and we were like, are we a fake metal band now? What’s going on? And then we just kind of went with it. We just let it take us wherever it was going.”
The guitarist adds that, in general, he feels like it’s critical to “listen to as much different stuff as you can” as a musician seeking to create.
“I think we all have a pretty broad spectrum of stuff that we enjoy — everybody does, really,” he shares. “There’s a time and a place for everything. What’s cool is that then that’s all up there in your subconscious somewhere in the giant supercomputer of your brain, and when you get to band practice and start coming up with stuff, you’re pulling from that bank of inspiration and letting that just sort of happen organically.”
The members of Alpha Hopper have some notable differences in their respective sources of inspiration, Scheider explains. He himself favors indie folk, while Rekhviashvili leans more towards “artier” and vocal-driven punk, he shares. Meanwhile, Toohill “loves industrial, heavy stuff,” and McMullen “definitely is one of the more broadly experimental listeners in the band.
“I think you hear us all pulling in that direction,” he adds. “A lot of the driving repetitive stuff will come from John, a lot of the more flourishy, free, weird stuff tends to come from me — you can hear the way that those differences in our tastes kind of pull at each other and contribute to what we’re doing.”
Alpha Hopper’s sound feels organically rich. McMullen shares that during the development of Alpha Hex Index, Alpha Hopper worked to tease out a theme from their creations.
“[There’s] a little bit of us kind of looking at this thing that we’ve created and being like: what is the sound of our band?” McMullen says. “I would say that we kind of straddle this line of being a pretty traditionally structured heavy rock band with chorus and verse and riffs and breakdowns and whatnot, but then we also kind of have always flirted with this more zanier, out there, artsy noise rock type of thing — it’s always been sort of an undercurrent.”
Their songs feel very solidly grounded in formidable and even sometimes vitriolic-sounding rock rhythms, with a real heaviness in the sound, and Alpha Hopper frequently perform with biting punk rock ferocity. Frequently, their rhythmic journeys also feel well off the ordinary tracks, as if frantically lunging into a metaphorical jungle. The songs, as well-rounded as they are, feel entirely (and rather invigoratingly) unpredictable.
“Not The Universe,” the record’s second track, delivers pointed, jagged blasts of uneasy rhythms, like suddenly ending up in a patch of turbulence during a plane ride, and this feeling repeats elsewhere. Like with ambitious science fiction cinema — a vibe that repeatedly pops up across Alpha Hex Index — there’s a clear emotional connection here in the gravitational pull of the ethereally uneasy music.
Their invigoratingly intense sound puts Alpha Hopper in good company on the roster of Hex Records — who Scheider says the band is “fuckin’ jazzed” to be working with, which McMullen echoes.
“When you look at the shit that I’m into, and the shit that we’re into, and the discography on Hex, it just seems like there’s a real symbiosis,” he observes. “I’ve been super excited about the band USA Nails for years now. They’re a big influence on me, and it’s really kind of a trip to be involved with some of the same people, but I think that what that speaks to is I think we have a real shared series of influences, and the stuff that makes us tick is really lining up. It feels good. It feels good to feel like we’re all kind of on some same page together, you know?”
The guitarist himself did recording and mixing work for Alpha Hex Index. McMullen says that he’s “new” at audio engineering, but the band took the “gamble” that trading precise production for a chance to more personally direct the songs would be worth it.
“Sonically, Ryan put his blood sweat and tears into getting this record from our instruments to your ears, from setting up the recording in John’s attic to getting all the tracks and going back a bunch of times to make sure things were how we wanted them, to getting the vocals down during COVID, putting in the hours and hours and hours — mixing it, getting it ready for mastering, working with our friend John Angelo, who was mastering it,” Scheider says. “That record is just like Ryan’s thumbprint basically, sonically, you know? The sound of the record is almost exactly what we wanted it to sound like just because Ryan put so, so much effort into it.”
The sound of the record, Scheider adds, is a critical part of the album’s experience.
“We’re real attached, I think, to how we play our instruments as an expression of ourselves,” the drummer shares. “We all really care about the idea and the intent of our actual performance, sort of like saying what we want to say. For the added agony of getting it out and what few places might feel less professional or something, it had the upside of we can really say: that’s how we play that. That’s what we want you to hear when we perform that thing.”
Pick up a copy here.
