There was a time when people would discover their new favorite rock band by listening to the radio at a restaurant or while driving around doing errands. I remember this time because I lived through it. You'd be sitting and waiting on a cheeseburger or taping your thumbs on the steering wheel while a bank teller prepared your account statement on the opposite end of a vacuum tube and then BAM! you'd be blindsided by a guitar hook that came out swinging over a local FM frequency, or you'd be temporarily transported by the liberatory howl of a singer whose name you needed to know STAT.
That's obviously not how it works now. Radio has become far more consolidated in its formatting over the past three decades meaning that only artists with a proven market share and guaranteed rate of return will get played. This also means that your chance of finding anything new while listening to the radio is becoming more and more remote.* I bring this all up, because if radio were still a way for young rock bands to connect with a potential audience, Hoity-Toity would be in the ears and on the lips of everyone under 40 right now.
The four-piece out of Redlands, CA consists of singer Shelby Muniz, bass player Tana Snyder, ax-wielder Aria Hurtado, and kit-crusher Kelsey Caselden, and when their powers combine, they produce some implacably catchy pop-punk that will take you back to the days when Sugarcult declared that they were "Stuck in America."
Their second EP Not Your Kind grabs the torch and takes off at a sprint on the first track "Y'know," a star-gazing whirlwind of sticky chords, wrapped the blinding shimmer of a tameless groove, pierced by the elegant arch of Shelby's pristine voice. "Mykinnacoma (Not Your Kind)" straps up for a scrap with dusty, hard rock groovse that circles around a fog of smokey, Sabbathy feedback like an MMA fighter looking for the opportunity to put their foot under their opponent's chin and score a KO blow. "Should Haven't" introduces a southern blues style to the band's repertoire which helps sell the tension of the song's woman-on-a-wire act, as well as doing the shovel work of preparing the listener for the Latin guitar-led and hard R'nB of the sardonically romantic, steadfast rebuke of "Small Dogs." The EP then leaves you with a final gust of fury with the thunder tom-backed, fat dance grooved, punk rock rave-up and burn down of "Norm" with its hot, back-talking leads that strike like a bolt of heavy metal thunder.
Your local DJ is doing you a disservice if they're not barricading themselves in the studio and blasting it out on their airwaves over the vociferous protests of their programming manager and the cracking sounds of office security breaking down the studio door. Not Your Kind cries out to be heard and we need some brave souls to bring it to the masses.
*And don't interject with an argument that Spotify playlists have taken over the cultural space radio used to occupy, because 1) it hasn't, and 2) these playlists don't promote the same kinds of connections to an artist that radio once did- Spotify playlists are tailored to listeners via an algorithm, meaning that listening to them is a highly isolating and individual experience. Further, these playlists largely serve as background noise and mood leveler for worker drones as they slowly burn out over a keyboard and wither before a three monitor display- in other words, it's not the same damn thing at all!
