The best word to describe ‘Postcard From A Living Hell’, the debut album from fast-rising Sydney band RedHook, would be chaotic. It oscillates from alt-pop to nu-metal, punk and electronicore without so much as a moment of respite, taking listeners on a rollercoaster of sounds and emotions. It’s a direct reflection of the band themselves, at once unapologetically fierce and vulnerable. NME sees that in a meeting with frontwoman Emmy Mack, squirrelled away in a quiet corner of her bustling hometown pub. “I am chaos,” she chuckles, declaring that eccentricity lies at the core of RedHook’s ethos.
“That was the one thing we were set on from the very start of this band,” she explains, “that we never, ever wanted to be pigeonholed. And it’s funny: with the ‘Bad Decisions’ EP [released 2021], we really confused the industry. A lot of the agencies and labels we were talking to, they were like, ‘We don’t understand, do we put you on tour with Northlane or The Veronicas?’ And we were like, ‘Both, baby!’ And we totally could be on both of those tours! So with this album, we intentionally wanted to double down on that – because fuck anyone that tries to categorise us.”
This kind of staunch individuality is hard-earned for Mack, who admits that she’s “always struggled with [her] identity, especially as a femme artist playing heavy music”. The version of Mack we often see onstage is a gutsy empress of intensity, commanding hordes of adoring devotees to mosh like their lives depend on it.
Mack calls this her “psycho badass persona” that she “love[s] to embody” in the moment – but it’s also exactly that: a persona. “I’ve always felt this pressure to be like that all the time,” she says, “but when I’m not in that kind of mood, it doesn’t feel right to pretend to be.
“I think femme artists have always been very easy to pigeonhole because the gatekeepers of the industry have made it that way. But we’re all really complex, nuanced, flawed characters – I am chaotic and multifaceted, and I want to be free to explore every side of that in my music.”
In doing so on ‘Postcard’, Mack dissects her own identity with a painstaking eye for detail, never shying away from the sides of herself most other artists would rather ignore. This involved mining years of trauma – some inflicted on her by colleagues in the music world – a “scary, but extremely cathartic” process that irreversibly changed her. “I was just vomiting out my heart and soul – all the ugliness I had inside me,” she says. “Everything is on this record. It’s pretty raw.”
A powerful example is the album’s second single, ‘Jabberwocky’, which draws from Mack’s experience being sexually assaulted on RedHook’s first international tour (a trip to the UK in 2019). It’s named for the monster in Alice In Wonderland, which Alice defeats by convincing herself it isn’t real – a metaphor for how Mack would “cope” with the trauma she absorbed from that experience. Except life is a lot less like Lewis Carroll’s fantasy, and we can’t conquer our demons by repressing them. So, leaning on her deeply ingrained belief that “music is the most powerful form of therapy”, Mack confronted her trauma by writing ‘Jabberwocky’.
“I want to make music that people can see themselves in, and helps them feel less alone in their darkest times” – Emmy Mack
“I actually didn’t realise [how traumatised I was] when I started writing that song,” she says, “and it wasn’t until I actually confronted what happened – like, really, really confronted it within myself – that I was able to properly process it. I don’t even have the words to describe that experience, but writing that song was so integral in my healing process. If I hadn’t’ve written it, I probably would’ve just kept going through this cycle of denial, thinking I was fine and then having these random anxiety attacks and emotional breakdowns whenever the tiniest trigger came up.”
Similarly healing was ‘Imposter’, a searing break-up anthem minted while Mack “was still grieving the relationship that inspired it”. She explains: “As anyone who’s been through a really shit break-up would know, you go through these phases of being like, ‘Fuck you, I don’t need you in my life! I’m a strong, independent woman!’ But then you have your vulnerable times, when you miss them and you start to think, ‘Well, maybe I can forgive them.’ But having ‘Imposter’ there, every time I started feeling my resolve weakening, I could listen to it and be like, ‘No, Emmy! This is how we feel!’ It helped me process that experience and put it behind me, and avoid wanting to run back into the inferno.”
To make ‘Imposter’, RedHook linked up with Yours Truly frontwoman Mikaela Delgado, who Mack praises as “a queen and a goddess, and my goodness, one of the most talented vocalists in the world”. The process itself, she says, was “just so beautiful for both of us, in so many ways” – not the least of which being that Delgado was “going through the exact same experience that I was”.
“We just trauma-bonded so hard over everything we’d been through,” Mack explains. “The first time I heard all the parts she added to that song, it just blew me away. I was in tears. And then I showed my boyfriend – who’s now off drumming for Yours Truly in the United States – and he was in tears. We were all just a big, beautiful, hysterical mess… In a fucked up way, it was kind of wholesome.”
That roundabout wholesomeness is ultimately Mack’s modus operandi: to use RedHook as “an outlet to process and express the fucked-up stuff I’m going through in a healthy way”, which in turn can inspire fans to reckon with their own struggles.
“The most important thing I can do as an artist is create music that helps people,” she says. “I want to make music that people can see themselves in, and helps them feel less alone in their darkest times. Because that’s what music has always been for me. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s so true; there are so many artists and albums that have helped me feel like I wasn’t a freak – that somebody else understands what I’m going through.”
Mack exorcised a lot of her demons on ‘Postcard’, but she assures us RedHook won’t be getting any softer on future releases. “I think the most important song I will ever write – the story I need to tell the most – hasn’t been written yet,” she reveals. “That’s a work in progress. I feel ready to tell that story, though, I just need to write the song… And I’m terrified to do that… But I’m also really, really excited.”
Redhook’s album ‘Postcard From a Living Hell’ is out now. The band tour Australia in May.