ALBUM REVIEW: RedHook – ‘Mutation’

This is the third significant album in a matter of months to fit the frame of ‘Australian pop-rock band with a female singer makes an album with more pronounced edge and gnash’. Granted, Yours Truly and Stand Atlantic grew into it whereas RedHook were there from the get-go, but it’s not like they’re not fitting among this little trend. That tends to happen a lot in Australia, where specific scenes and sounds will really take off, à la metalcore or garage-punk. Clearly their musical ecosystem is just as susceptible to being thrown off by an invasive species as their natural one, though RedHook and co. might actually be the originators of their wave. You don’t really see too many others exploring the pop-rock / nu-metal intersection to the same extent, probably because it’s hard not to be totally overwhelmed by how many synchronous parts need to be kept track of.

Stand Atlantic pulled it off really well with WAS HERE earlier this year, though, and arguably RedHook’s Postcard From A Living Hell from 2023 was ever better. That’s the album that you could credibly say carries the face of this style, not just because it’s a payoff to where its creators have always been, but because it feels the most purposeful in showing that off. Upon a revisit, it’s startling how much of that album has stuck thanks to RedHook being as sharp as they are. And continuing on a similar beat with Mutation…yeah, RedHook haven’t lost it. Despite how quickly it’s come around, there’s nothing that feels explicitly rushed to capitalise on a burgeoning trend. If anything, it shows how canny RedHook are with their positioning amongst said trend, in that no one seems to have a better handle on it than them.

It’s important to note how reliant that is on having the fundamentals of current-day pop-rock locked in firm, and how RedHook simply run away with that. Emmy Mack is the precise shape of genre’s current sect of trailblazing frontwomen, with plenty of room to be loud and uncensored in ways that have only recently been afforded. You get that most on Hot Tub and Cannibal, where describing their lyrics as ‘double entendres’ would be vastly overestimating how much subtlety they each have. Alpha Wolf’s Lochie Keogh appears on the latter for a metalcore assist, though that could just as easily be Mach herself reaching a ferally horny fever pitch. Inversely effective, Dr. Frankenstein’s “fuck like we’re porn stars” line is a labour to fit snugly into this more earnest pop-rock cut.

Regardless, Mack is the firecracker performer that always ends up the ace player in bands like this. Bomb.com’s strident, motor-mouthed yammer is great at holding one of the clearer parallels to Stand Atlantic, that being to ROCKSTAR in its cutting down of a tall poppy whose fame has them casting unjust aspersions on smaller acts, and who very well could be the same antagonist in both cases. Elsewhere, Breaking Up With and Party Zombie are pieces of tried-and-true pop-rock soul-searching imbued with RedHook’s crackling flair. As a whole, Mutation can feel less fragmented as a whole despite its thematic zig-zags, almost entirely down to how game Mack is to throw her kinetic, animated self into any space available.

Thus, that parlays into a pretty trim, tight-knit collection of songs that can fully and effectively temper its impulses to blow everything out. In the case of a song like HEXX that’s the most straightforwardly metallic offering here, that comes in a Nova Twins-esque rodomontade that’s just as fitting to Mack’s knifelike delivery. There’s also the scraping synths on Bomb.com that are clearly poised as additions to its titanic swing instead of distractions, and a clattering, loud alt-metal lockstep on Hurt Like Hell that’s one of the least embossed fusions on the album, but also the cleanest. It makes all the difference for RedHook not having errant shard of metal edging jutting from their mix, and having to rolling with the punches and make out that they’re a stylistic choice. You can clearly tell that this is a band founded in this approach when they’re so much more comprehensive with it. Even the saxophone on Breaking Up With works well enough to tell that this isn’t some brand new, haphazard trick; there’s prior experience, more importantly with success.

Admittedly though, for all its various woven threads, Mutation’s greatest strengths come from RedHook on as pure a pop-rock wavelength as they can reach. Chalk up Dr. Frankenstein as the album’s unassailable waterline for that reason alone, where Mack and Holding Absence’s Lucas Woodland constantly trying to outpace each other on some goliath hooks can steamroll over even an aforementioned dodgy line. Honestly, you’d struggle to find much on Mutation that doesn’t burrow its way in with little trouble. At an absolute worst, Scream 2 is maybe not quite as memorable as the rest, though having it tucked away towards the album’s end after so many unquestionable hits leaves it as more of a net neutral.

And besides, everything ‘wrong’ with RedHook on this album is still considerably less severe than what afflicts most albums of this stripe. There are nowhere near as many limitations inadvertently uncovered alongside strengths here; Mutation is a genuinely strong album that knows exactly why that is. Even of those albums do tend to pull it together, it’s still refreshing to see. Coupled with the fact that RedHook continue to have the best compositional and chorus-crafting know-how of all of their small group, and you’ve got another album ready to spearhead the scene at a moment’s notice. Hopefully that’s just around the corner, and 2025 is the year in which RedHook get the flowers that they’re owed.

For fans of: Stand Atlantic, Hot Milk, Vukovi

‘Mutation’ by RedHook is released on 22nd November on Adventure Cat Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall