Every so often an album lands and makes everything around it feel slightly less interesting. Houndstooth and The Hum is one of those records. It captivates from start to finish, each track contributing to the whole, the production impeccable throughout. The title alone tells you something about Molly Vulpyne‘s sensibility. Houndstooth: classic, structured, quietly powerful. The hum: meditative, spiritual, a frequency felt as much as heard. A collision of contrasts that turns out to be the perfect compass for everything that follows.
Houndstooth and The Hum arrives with a restless energy that leaves genre labels feeling irrelevant. Grungy, melodic garage punk bleeds into post-punk and alternative rock shades into something more atmospheric. Molly Vulpyne make it all feel inevitable rather than calculated. Occasionally, the ghosts of PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, Courtney Love and Garbage drift through, but the band never leans on them. The comparisons are a starting point for listeners, not a destination for the band.
The ten tracks blend remastered singles with fresh studio polish, alongside new material that more than holds its own. The opening track, Hook, sets the bar high with its crisp drums, dirty guitar riff and drawling rock vocals that growl with wounded authority. The refrain, ‘Take that hook right out of my skin’, is visceral and precise; the sound of someone clawing their way free from emotional captivity, one barb at a time.
I Don’t Fit follows and feels almost cinematic in contrast: it opens like Nirvana‘s Heart-Shaped Box before flipping into a fiery, tight piece of rock, guitars brilliantly layered, every drumbeat distinct. Its subject, the misery of belonging neither to the nine-to-five world nor the artistic one, hits with serene, collapsing weight rather than panic. Between these two tracks alone, an entire emotional world opens up.
Originally released on the Amortise EP in 2024, Inertia Right Hand Man loses nothing in its new setting. Anchored by a psych-inflected, hypnotic and unhurried acoustic riff, the vocals land somewhere between Courtney Love‘s Doll Parts and Kristin Hersh at her most raw. It drags you in and holds you there. I Wanna Be Your Filter then takes a sharp left turn, an Irish-tinged track that flirts with fast-paced country with powerful drums and nimble guitar dynamics.
14 is the album’s quiet devastation: echoing acoustics, drifting vocals and a mellow, Hole-esque tenderness suffused with grief. Written about a lost grandfather, it mourns without melodrama, and this restraint makes it hit harder. Then My Expiry bursts in: a driving, stop-start punk song about societal pressure and the weight of expectation, with an absolutely belting chorus.
The closing track, Ode to Your Farewell, ends things with a bang: a punk rock gut-punch of crunching guitars and brutally honest emotion that detonates the album rather than concluding it. And for those who make it through: there’s a hidden spoken-word track waiting, though you’ll have to buy the record to find it.
Houndstooth and The Hum is a stunning debut, emotionally honest, sonically restless, and delivered by a band who already sound completely, defiantly themselves.
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