Interview with bassist Dylan Hulett | By Joshua Maranhas
Shoegazing, heavy, post-hardcore—Chicago’s Lume are all of it, and they are more.
Defining post-hardcore gets more difficult each day, as hardcore grows beyond the music many artists grew up with. “We were in a little bit heavier hardcore bands growing up,” bassist Dylan Hulett says. “[When] I initially went to my first local shows, the scene we grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, was solely based around hardcore. That was kind of the idea in the back of our minds this whole time. As we get older, we’ve kind of strayed further and further from that type of genre. Definitely, we’ll always have roots in that for sure.”
Those roots are apparent on their sophomore LP, Wrung Out, released via Equal Vision Records on April 20, but Equal Vision has long been a space to workshop new ideas. From Ray Cappo’s thinking between Youth of Today and the creation of Shelter to Converge’s Jane Doe, it’s where undefined artists find a place to define themselves. “I thought about that when we initially went forward,” Hulett says. “Maybe nowadays, it’s a little strange, [but] the older people who know Equal Vision from back in the day can listen to this album and kind of relate a little bit.”
Lume have experienced the ultimate loss—the death of friends to suicide and drug overdoses—and Wrung Out was written during a time of coping and overcoming pain. What came out is a sound that explores emotions above genres. Hulett offers a timeline, explaining, “In between us writing, in the same year, multiple friends passed away—toward the end of 2016, like October, November, December, all within three months of each other. One was a close friend here in Chicago, and the other two were people we grew up with back in Port Huron. One being, basically, my—see, me and my brother, the drummer of the band, [Austin Hulett], we grew up together in the same household [with] our next-door neighbor. He didn’t really have a family, his family was very broken, so my family kind of took him in a little bit. So, he was more than just a friend, he was kind of like a brother to us, spending holidays and weekends, as much time as possible, at our house growing up. It was definitely a hard hit for us.”
“It’s such a weird thing,” he continues, “I feel like the record reflects that. Not only in a few of the songs, the record as a whole, how it’s kind of—not all over the place. I think, in my opinion, there a lot of different influences peeking in, and it’s kind of up and down a lot. I feel like that’s what we went through when going through loss. Sometimes, you’re super sad, missing that person, then other times, you’re stoked, because you’re remembering all the fun times you had. So, I feel like this record is just dealing with all of these emotions that come from, you know, loss and mourning. [From] the initial hearing about the person passing away to accepting it.”
Wrung Out gave the Midwest band the latitude to explore themselves. “Emotions were all over the place, like ‘Could we have helped them?’ ‘Could we have done something to help this?’ ‘Why did this person decide to do this?’” Hulett recalls. “The mental illness factor, the addiction factor, all these things were playing through our heads. One day, when we were writing, we were thinking about it, like ‘Man, this really sucks that this happened,’ and then, we wrote ‘Unending’—looking at it from someone’s point of view of being sad and upset and being confused about their life. Then, another day, we were just laughing and joking and having fun thinking about memories of the person. We were writing an uplifting song like a few of the songs on there.”
“So, I think the genre—as far as, like, song-to-song—has a lot to do with what we were feeling that week, that day, that time when we were writing that specific song,” he says. “I feel like that is why it’s all over the place, because instead of approaching this like ‘Let’s write a record,’ we approached it like ‘Let’s write the best songs we can write at this time.’ As just singles, in a way. It’s kind of strange almost, now that I’m talking about it out loud.”
With all of that going on, Lume were able to grab a million feelings and cross several genres. Hulett describes his experience as “mixing so many feelings and emotions and ways of writing music, ways of sounding. Like textures, tones—it’s hard to pinpoint a band when they’re taking influences from all over.”
If healing has a genre, a sound, a category, then Wrung Out is healingcore. “It’s kind of [about] carrying on, and it feels good to let it all out and get this record out, move past it emotionally,” Hulett concludes. “[It] helps with the healing process.”
