Welcome back to Consequence‘s Dusting ‘Em Off, which examines classic albums that have found an enduring place in pop culture. Today, Hum become oft-overlooked shoegaze pioneers with You’d Prefer an Astronaut.
When Matt Talbott got an email asking to use his song in a Cadillac commercial, his initial response was, “Yeah, sure, whatever man.” It was 2007; his band Hum had broken up seven years prior, and the song in question, “Stars,” dropped five years before that. These kinds of reach-outs always happened, Talbott recalled at the time, often to no avail.
That skeptical email response is exactly what you might expect from Hum, whose members began making shoegaze-infused post-hardcore together after meeting at a cafe in the Champaign-Urbana area, best known as the home of the University of Illinois and the American Football House. But the bandmates were deeply involved in the flourishing local scene, and – after naming themselves as a sort of tongue-in-cheek descriptor of their roaring guitar tones – Hum’s early lineup of Talbott, Bryan St. Pere, Rod Van Huis, and Andy Switzky wound up in the basement home studio of Steve Albini to record their punkish 1990 demo tape Is Like Kissing an Angel. Within the five years that followed, Hum signed to major label RCA to put out their third studio album You’d Prefer an Astronaut.
Fast-forward to the Cadillac commercial: By then, the days of Hum were over, at least according to its members. And with their RCA deal expired, Talbott and his bandmates weren’t even aware that the licensing deal had been finalized until he just so happened to see the commercial by chance himself. In the driver’s seat is Grey’s Anatomy star Kate Walsh, who proposes a new benchmark question for valuing luxury vehicles: “When you turn your car on…does it return the favor?” Her stilettoed foot then slams the gas as Hum’s blast of guitars kicks in, almost as if replicating the sound of the Cadillac’s revving engine – a sound synonymous with shoegaze.
“Stars” saw success on alt radio upon its initial release, but the Cadillac commercial re-introduced Hum and You’d Prefer an Astronaut to a much more accepting audience. Shoegaze was not yet embraced by the general US rock audiences in 1995. While genre pioneers like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Lush delighted in mainstream success in their respective Irish and British homelands, their most comparable counterparts to American audiences were arguably Swervedriver, who were still riding the post-Nevermind grunge wave; or Swirlies, whose noisy guitar pop was usually too weird to break into the mainstream. Hum were products of the hardcore scene, and though those roots are evident on Astronaut, the album also solidified Hum as some of the US’ earliest true adopters of shoegaze.
And so it’s especially fitting that Astronaut begins with “Little Dipper,” which is nearly five minutes of the type of fuzzed-out, wall-of-sound guitars that made Loveless a classic. But what My Bloody Valentine didn’t quite have was the foreboding air lying under “Little Dipper,” a quality that Hum’s immediate successors would take and run with: “[Astronaut is] where Deftones get a big part of our influence from, tone-wise,” Chino Moreno said in a 2010 interview. “There are these huge chords going on, a huge backbeat, rolling basslines going on underneath, a lot of that has directly inspired certain songs.”
From the headbanging vigor of “The Pod” to the slowcore closer “Songs of Farewell and Departure,” you can hear traces of Hum in bands like Deafheaven, Title Fight, Nothing, and Cloakroom, the latter of whom would actually go on to work directly with Talbott. As younger generations of rockers tap into Hum’s melodic, yet colossal sound, You’d Prefer an Astronaut has only become more of an unsung touchstone in the past 28 years..
It’s boggling to realize that a song like “Change (In the House of Flies)” just wouldn’t have ever existed without Astronaut, in part because Talbott never reaches the sort of impassioned intensity that Moreno mastered. But part of Hum’s allure is Talbott’s detachment. He rattles off psychedelic outer space imagery on numerous songs, and when he’s not explicitly referencing stars or galactic exploration, he’s creating a vacuum of his own: “I’m lonelier than God/ And all my wishes spin the fishes in the air,” he sings on the wistful “Suicide Machine,” constructing a setting that one could only imagine would be free of gravity or time. By speak-singing these revelations in his flat drawl, Talbott takes the novelty out of it; he’s used to feeling out of this world, giving his words a well-worn familiarity.
But Astronaut is less about feeling like an alien than it is about being engulfed by a love that feels transcendental. Talbott has said that the record is mostly love songs, and it’s that lens that seems to shape his entire worldview: “If we ignore the signals that mission control will send/ It’s one big ship ride anyway, this hell will never end/ We gaze out on what they left of the stars/ All we see now, we can take as ours,” he murmurs on the post-apocalyptic “Little Dipper.” On “I’d Like Your Hair Long,” the album’s title becomes a subtle dig: “You’d prefer an astronaut/ Someone to relate to and someone to command,” he sings, as if to say he’s the only person in this scenario with a grasp on reality.
Talbott knew going into Astronaut that he wasn’t necessarily the strongest singer. So Hum zeroed in on what would become their defining characteristic: Guitars. Tim Lash, who replaced Switzky on lead guitar in 1993, and Talbott both had an uncanny ability to duplicate their performances. When either of them recorded a take they were pleased with, they’d immediately record an identical second track, and then a third. “Hum wanted to get the fattest guitar sounds they’d ever heard on a record,” Astronaut’s producer Keith Cleversley once recalled of their first day in his studio. “[They] quickly got to setting up more gear than I’d ever seen a band use.”
You’d Prefer an Astronaut is evidence of the magic that comes from a band who know exactly what they want out of their art, paired up with a deeply in-sync producer, all bearing the proficiency to make it come to life. Sadly, Hum would disband shortly after the album’s follow-up, 1998’s Downward Is Heavenward, and “Stars” would remain their sole hit. They re-emerged over two decades later for 2020’s Inlet, surprise-released with the same sort of nonchalant attitude that often lay beneath Talbott’s vocals. It was as if they had no concerns over what was happening on earth – they were just stopping by.
