Across two albums and a near-perfect singles collection in the early 2010s, Hunx and His Punx spritzed a campy perfume cloud in garage rock’s musky basement. The California-based band crash-landed with catchy-as-fuck songs about eating makeup and hooking up with guys with shitty music taste, delivered over fuzzed-out guitar and stacked harmonies that tossed the Ramones and the Shangri-Las into a blender. Lead singer and guitarist Seth Bogart, vocalist and bassist Shannon Shaw, and drummer Erin Emslie’s candy-colored, John Waters-inspired rock’n’roll fantasia relished in vulgarity but had a bleeding heart, even as they indulged in art-punk antics onstage (see: sky-high wigs, elaborate stage design, or Bogart drinking from water bottles filled with his own piss between songs).
On comeback album Walk Out on This World, their first outing since going on hiatus in 2013, Hunx and His Punx mature in their own way. Following several years reckoning firsthand with grief—Shaw lost her fiancé in a car accident in 2022, and Bogart’s Los Angeles home was devastated in the Eaton fires earlier this year—here the band sheds its early mischief in favor of jangling garage rock filled with heartache and disillusionment about both lost loves and the burning Earth itself. Coming together like a series of lucid morning-after revelations, Walk Out on This World sharpens the band’s toolkit through brawny guitar riffs, rousing lyrics, and near-equal time given to Bogart and Shaw’s voices, adding depth and color to their punk and girl-group homages.
Despite the occasionally serious subject matter, Walk Out on This World’s themes still arrive tucked into jubilant, hard-nosed punk. A kick drum knocks like a heartbeat on “Rainy Day in LA,” where Shaw delivers a sorrowful treatise. “Since you went away I had to warm up the thoughts in my mind/Since you went away I had to thaw out my frozen insides,” she sings, until the weight of the sentiment gives way beneath her. Recalling The Moon Is in the Wrong Place, Shaw’s stellar, heartbroken 2023 album with Shannon and the Clams, her wildly expressive, gravelly voice evinces a spectrum of emotion: disappointment, resignation, and eventually anguish consume her. She carries the same gravitas on the title track, a gorgeous slow-burner that sounds like it’s echoing from a jukebox in a smoky roadhouse. “What if I walked out on this world?” she asks over a swinging, rockabilly guitar. “I’m just so numb/Is it time to go home?” Shaw’s spiral finds clarity during the song’s moving chorus, injecting emotion with her gale-force voice: “Right on time/He floats into my mind and says/‘Oh, what a waste that would be.’”
