Wednesday September 30 @ Aisle 5
Triple D’s and Speakeasy present…
Graham Hunt, Tanner York, Max’s Fable
7pm / $16 - $18 / All Ages
Graham Hunt can’t stop making records. Since 2019, the Madison, WI-based songwriter has been amassing a dense catalog of singular music at a pace rivaled only by the quality of the output itself. Now already on his sixth album, American Pyramid, Hunt pushed himself out of his comfort zones, eschewing the homespun, computer-oriented explorations of his previous work and instead entering Minnesota's legendary Pachyderm Studio with an eight-piece band to try and capture a different side of his boundless creativity. The result is an album that stretches out musically and lyrically, with Hunt using his surrealist spin to dissect both the traditions of American indie rock as well as the unnerving detachment of the American experience itself.
American Pyramid arrives barely a year after Hunt’s 2025 album, Timeless World Forever, the final release in a trilogy of records and a capstone on a significant part of his life. “I knew I was going to be moving from this house where the home studio is, so I gave myself the limitation of making those three albums that specific way, and then I knew I’d do something different,” he explains. “Part of me felt like I could live in that house and make an infinite amount of records there with the same process forever, but for a long time I’d also had this vision for tracking an album live with a band in a studio–I knew that’s how I wanted to make the next record even before I wrote any songs for it.” Hunt’s innate creative restlessness has always served him well but it wasn’t enough to simply record the songs with a group rather than alone: he even self-imposed limitations on the writing process itself, choosing to avoid demoing on the computer or even fleshing out the songs beyond simple iphone voice memos. “I wanted to keep it to just chords and melody and then figure out the rest with a group of people in a live room studio setting, I just hadn't done it like that in a very long time.”
And this would be no ordinary live band, instead a group of eight fellow multi-instrumentalists, each an impressive creative in their own right, all assembled to help Hunt see his vision through. “I was thinking about all the people who have played in my band in all its different iterations over the years, and I just wanted to try and get as many of them involved as possible,” he explains. “We only did two rehearsals before we went into the studio and everyone ended up swapping instruments and changing roles throughout recording. That sort of helped to recreate some of the feeling of what I do when I’m making music with the computer, but executed with a full band.”
The group decamped to Pachyderm Studio, the famous recording site of countless iconic albums, from Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, to more recent records like Bully’s Sugaregg or Beach House’s Once Twice Melody. The isolated location allowed the band to immerse themselves in the work, and the session proved fruitful, but when Hunt got home and began to receive rough mixes, something didn’t feel quite right. “I had a bit of a crisis at first, ” he laughs. “It didn’t turn out how I had it in my head and that threw me off. There were so many things I’d have done differently if I’d been making it by myself, and it felt unnatural. But I had to remind myself that was the whole point–I had to submit myself to the spirit of the idea and now I’m really proud of how it turned out.”
As American Pyramid came together in the mix, Hunt was struck with even further inspiration, and another batch of songs began to take shape that felt connected to the material already recorded. “I did some harmonies and guitar doubles, some noises and experiments with the songs,” he explains.“But I ended up writing even more and decided to pepper some of those homemade songs in as well.” The result is a record that bridges the gap between Hunt’s past and present work, and hints at countless directions that he could go in next. “The audio quality is obviously pretty different but for how much I attempted to make the whole album in this new way, it still feels like me,” he says. “It kinda makes you realize all the instrumentation and the bells and whistles are just the frosting and what makes people connect to it at the end of the day are just the songs in their most basic form.”
Yet the songs themselves are anything but basic. The album opens with “Straight Line To Love,” a slowburn build where instruments enter the arrangement like each band member introducing themselves: first a gentle hi-hat pattern and simple organ chords, then comes the 12-string guitar, then bass, and finally Hunt’s voice. Around the halfway point, the track roars to life as the full band kicks in to sweep listeners off their feet via Hunt’s way with a hook. The song’s melodic sweep almost belies the frustration and longing in his lyrics, which introduce American Pyramid’s recurring motif: the nagging unease and loneliness that pokes out around the corners of everyday life, and the ways we try to avoid it. “I think a lot of the record is just about feeling really isolated and trying to cope with that. It’s something that feels very American to me, it has less to do with how we actually choose to live our lives and more to do with structural things about the culture we live in. You can be surrounded by people, you can be a part of a community–but there’s this intrinsic isolation to modern life that feels kind of inescapable.”
“Waiting For You To Come Home” explores this strange existential limbo with Hunt’s signature combination of unbeatable melodies and vivid imagery about the doldrums of existence. “You have to create meaning in your own life and I think that can be a difficult thing for a lot of people. You try all these different things–hobbies, or spirituality, or drugs, or being super social, or whatever–but at the end of the day you’re still sitting around not knowing what to do, so you walk down the street to get ice cream and eat it while watching TV.” Tracks like the Pachyderm-recorded rave-up “Riverboat Blues” seamlessly segue into the home-recorded music like “Dust Underwater,” both veering into escapist fantasies where vibrant production flourishes match the surreal storytelling. Or elsewhere mid-album standout “Getting Older” offers some of Hunt’s most instantly satisfying guitar pop and the most grounded lyrics on American Pyramid. It’s this ability to straddle so many different sounds, emotions, and moods that makes Hunt such a special songwriter. Very few would even attempt to combine Westerberg-ian everyman rock with gonzo autotuned vocal runs, or psychedelic lyrical abstractions with heart-on-sleeve musings about the relentless march of time–and fewer still could pull it off like Hunt does throughout American Pyramid.
The record comes to a close with “You Always Have The Morning,” a wild ride of wacked-out pub rock that somehow brings to mind both the freewheeling joy of early Bruce Springsteen and the unhinged improvisations of Butthole Surfers. Through the din, Hunt sings a surprisingly hopeful refrain about the inherent possibilities of just making it to the next day, how there’s always something new on the other side–even if it’s just another song to work on. “I think everyone wants to fill that hole and give their lives meaning,” he says. “Sometimes you feel like you’re trying things that don’t work or it seems like you’re doing it all in vain, but then in the end you do see a positive result.” It’s probably not a coincidence that this outlook isn’t dissimilar to Hunt's approach to making American Pyramid. “I’m not sure if anyone can ever really fill the hole,” he says, “but the closest I’ve ever come is with making music.”
