This summer is lining up to be Hot Milk’s biggest ever. From headlining the Kerrang! Stage at Slam Dunk to a handful of dates supporting their heroes Green Day to the small matter of releasing second album Corporation P.O.P… it’s a miracle they’ve got time to even think. But in a rare spot of downtime, we meet Han Mee and Jim Shaw to get the skinny on their new record and why they’ll never compromise.
In England, the solution to a chaotic day tends to be the pub. And so it is for Hot Milk’s dual vocalists and guitarists Han Mee and Jim Shaw, who are currently running three hours behind schedule for their gig in Brighton this evening, marking the end of a series of intimate shows.
Of course, it's not a Hot Milk tour unless something goes wrong, and today they're dealing with all the fun and games of a tyre blow-out, and having to unload all of their gear at the roadside for it to be repaired in a timely manner.
Soaking up the welcome springtime sun outside the Patterns venue on the seafront is a loyal and ever-growing line of fans, who’ve been gathering since the early afternoon. A positive sign of the band’s burgeoning popularity for sure, and despite the ballache of this morning’s travel terror, the band (completed by bassist Tom Paton and drummer Harry Deller) are still in good spirits, making time to chat to those already waiting before unloading their gear with pace.
While Tom and Harry continue setting up, we make our way over to the Camelford Arms, which displays a chalkboard outside its door reading ‘Everyone welcome’, and directly below it, ‘Donald Trump is an anagram of Damp Old Runt’. Han takes a photo. The pair, absolutely ravenous, order food and agree to chat while eating. Cher’s The Shoop Shoop Song plays over the speakers. Balance is restored.
“It’s always hectic with us, it doesn’t matter what we do. Something either goes wrong, or we try to cram too much into too little time. It’s been fun, but it’s been pretty brutal,” explains Jim.
Plans going askew is so common that the Hot Milk faithful have already asked the band if their van had broken down “again”. On a day like today, though, moving on from the madness is made a little easier by the spring air. You can almost smell festival season, the beer gardens, and when the sun shines on England, you forget how bleak it can feel under the usual soulless blanket of grey clouds.
If anything, it only further sums up the spine of Hot Milk’s new record, Corporation P.O.P. It explores the complex relationship that most Brits have with this country, a sort of love-hate dichotomy that's often difficult to explain to people outside of it. Hot Milk’s story as a band so far, and the process of making this album in particular, only further puts it into perspective. Cut them and they proudly bleed Northern England, but they're not afraid to call out the country’s faults.
Produced by Jim (alongside Zach Jones and KJ Strock), the record was put together in roughly two months, across both Hollywood and “a bedroom in Salford opposite an Aldi”. A confusing juxtaposition of grandeur and normalcy, and one that many artists now find themselves in.
“Labels aren’t putting money behind bands anymore because they don’t make any money themselves. The world has changed, no-one buys CDs as much as they used to. If this band existed 20 years ago, we’d be in a completely different state of affairs, but we live in a very quick society,” unpicks Han. “People are absorbing stuff very quickly and moving on, and there’s very little loyalty to art anymore. I wish I could come up with a magic fucking spell to oust all the nepo babies.”
Hmm. Nepotism, the saturated music landscape, and corporation pop. There’s sort of a link between these things, no?
“Bands in general are all sounding quite similar, and it’s because they’re all using the same samples,” Han says. “Some bands don’t even track live drums anymore, which is insane.”
So, to avoid having Corporation P.O.P sound like, well, corporation pop, Hot Milk went all-out with an analogue set-up.
“We didn’t want it to feel overproduced, and fans have said in the past, ‘Some of your songs don’t quite capture the energy that they have live on record,’ and we were like, ‘That’s interesting. Let’s see if we can do that,’” Jim explains. “We really tried to capture a take rather than polishing it into something perfect.”
“I wish I could come up with a magic spell to oust all the nepo babies”
To achieve the ‘real’ rock sound they wanted, they plugged in hardware synthesisers and toyed with a load of different guitar pedals for a “tangible” environment that allowed for the hands-on tweaking of knobs and dials. “We just took it back to how it’s supposed to be,” Jim says.
This is what Hot Milk love about being artists: going completely against the trend of music made for algorithms. Will they ever make songs for the sake of virality? Will they fuck.
“It turns your art into a product, and it makes it throwaway. Thirty seconds? Fuck off. Why do I have to put it into 30 seconds and do a dance with it? That’s why I spend a lot of time off the internet,” Jim admits.
“Where was that in The Filth And The Fury, or School Of Rock?” jokes Han, exasperated. “I bought Kerrang! every week like everybody else did. I was on MySpace. Let me just play my songs to people. It’s all we ever wanted.”
Frustrations with the music industry are merely the tip of the iceberg. In fact, ‘corporation pop’ was also a term used by Han’s grandad in reference to tap water when she was growing up. Which got her brain ticking...
“The pain that we’re all currently experiencing in modernity is running through all of us. It’s running through all our homes,” she muses. “The other thing is the P.O.P. stands for ‘payment of pain’, it’s the commodification of pain. In this world at the minute, we all must pay with being slightly in pain. It’s in a lack of community, it’s just heavy. I feel it on my chest every day, and it makes me worry, do I ever want to have kids? All that kind of shit. I’m 32 now, and I have to decide what I’m going to do about it over the next few years... So I think it’s a triple meaning in that sense.”
She’s right; community is a precious thing that’s disappearing. In the UK, 1,243 council-run youth centres closed between 2010 and 2023, with just 581 still in operation by the end of March that year. Vital spaces for young people – which can help to keep them out of crime and dangerous situations – are dying out due to lack of funding. Hell, even adults can’t afford to go to the pub or a club anymore. Grassroots music venues are closing at a dramatic rate. It kinda feels like this country is in the bin.
Enter Corporation P.O.P’s attention-grabbing artwork, featuring a wheelie bin with the St. George's flag set alight within. The cover was shot outside Jim’s home using his very own council-provided bin. It’s an idea he was reluctant to at the start, despite Han’s enthusiasm, and upon a quick Google search, it turned out the bins are very flammable and very toxic when set alight. So, they enlisted the help of designer Harley Wrecks, who recreated the flames using some CGI magic (not AI – suggesting so will get you on Hot Milk’s bad side).
“I wanted something quite strong and thought-provoking,” continues Han. “The fucking flag’s in bin, it’s going to shit. What are we going to do about it?”
It’s a pertinent question, because if anything, the world has only gone more to shit since Hot Milk wrote this album. Conflicts and wars, the unbearable costs of living, rights being stripped from minorities and the most vulnerable across the globe. It’s an ugly picture out there.
And in the lives of working musicians like Hot Milk, touring outside of the UK is becoming more and more difficult. It’s virtually impossible to cross the pond without some kind of financial backing.
“I don’t want to be like, ‘Woe is me,’ because what we do is fucking amazing. And it’s a dream that we’ve both had since we were kids. But with Brexit, with Trump and his tariffs, and visas costing $20,000 for three years, the cost of fuel going up, [it’s] awful,” Jim begins. “We’re haemorrhaging cash when we go to America. [In] Europe we sometimes break even. It’s just a dire situation. No-one’s supporting the arts in the UK at the moment.”
“I had a dialogue with [Mayor of Greater Manchester] Andy Burnham about this. I saw him at a party, and [said], ‘What the fuck are you doing, Andy?!’” Han remembers with a smile, adding that when she questioned him on his support for artistic spaces in the city, the vocalist was told she’d need to attend his office to properly converse on the matter.
Although she's yet to take Andy up on his offer, with a politics degree in her back pocket, Han will always challenge those who have the potential to be change-makers: “I can’t shout about it in my songs and not be the person to do it. I still think I’m going to be Prime Minister, mate. That’s my delusional self.”
“Good God…” Jim jests.
“It’s a dire situation – no-one’s supporting the arts in the UK at the moment”
There’s a track on Corporation P.O.P. that is the epitome of England the bad boyfriend, and it’s a little more lighthearted than the usual political underbelly of Hot Milk's music. Insubordinate Ingerland is a bleak celebration, and as Han puts it, a “smile in the face of grimace”.
“At a wake, it’s a party usually, innit? You always get pissed. This is our party at wake,” she says.
It mocks the arrogance of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’, but also holds mirror to working-class identity and the small joys within it – football, popping the kettle on for a good brew. It also could well be the first-ever song to mention the delicacy of mushy peas (even better when served in a shitty polystyrene cup) before going into a filthy breakdown. It truly is something to behold, and thus its funny bone made it a rather difficult vision to bring to life.
“Lyrically it was the easiest, but melody-wise, it felt like a bit of an outlier. The rest of the album’s quite dark and a bit heavier than we have [done] before,” Jim says. “It is probably one of my favourite songs off the album, but it was just really hard to work out what to do with it.”
It turned out to be just crazy enough to work.
“Even down to the breakdown at the end where we were trying to get that right in the studio. [Han was] like, ‘What about if we just did the, ‘duh, duh, duh-duh-duh [England football chant]?’ I was like, ‘That’s stupid, but it’s fucking genius,’” laughs Jim.
Han’s eyes widen. You can almost see the word ‘genius’ lit up in her pupils. Jim will never live this down.
With plates cleared, time is starting to tick towards doors opening back at Patterns. They’ll have just enough time to squeeze in their pre-show ritual of having a boogie to shake off any nerves or stresses, of which you’d imagine there’d be many after a tightly-packed day. And yet, Jim and Han still appear cool as cucumbers.
Working on switching off and taking care of their mental health is something Hot Milk prioritise a lot more these days. When at home, they take long walks, they go to raves – a sacred form of release for the pair, explored in new track Warehouse Salvation – and they “love a barbecue”.
“These new songs are so hard to play live, but it’s been an enjoyable challenge. We all feel like a unit,” explains Jim. “We see how many fans are being brought together through our stupid little projects.”
Hot Milk graft hard to keep things afloat. They constantly make sacrifices – be it with their time and or money – to simply keep the cogs turning. They believe in this band, and the community it’s forged.
Jim explains, “I have to work to be able to do this. Tom works at a pizza place. I do lights for bands. I work all fucking day, every day, in order to make sure I can do this and survive.”
“We all call him the most stressed man in Salford,” Han laughs (a nickname originally coined by Boston Manor’s Henry Cox). “He’s probably the hardest worker out there.”
Joy for Hot Milk lies in their stubbornness to survive. To find pockets of happiness that can’t be stripped away like friendship, music and unity.
Another way they keep up their resilience is by checking their own privileges.
“It’s still fucked,” says Han of the state of England. “[But] I think people need to realise that 60 years ago we didn’t have running water in a lot of homes. We didn’t have toilets in the house. Look how far we’ve come generationally. It’s not perfect, but we’ve only just got ourselves to a place of infrastructure. Social change comes slowly, and it’s always going to be a pendulum. If we can fight back against that pendulum coming back this way, that’s what’s needed. But I don’t think the fight will ever end. There’s always going to be dumb people in the world…”
“I don’t think it’s stupidity, I think sometimes it’s arrogance, just people being unwilling to listen to anyone,” adds Jim.
Home soil isn’t where this album stops, but it is interesting to see a band lean so heavily into their roots in. With labels often driving artists to ‘make it in America’, it could be suggested that niche Britishisms could be a little alienating to a large listener base. Put this to Hot Milk, and they don’t give a shit. Why? Because of the legacies left by some of the great homegrown bands that have come before them.
Han quizzes, “Why shouldn’t we make England the home of music again? The fucking best bands in the world come out of [the North of England]. Why are we pandering to America? I’m not doing that. You either like us or you don’t. Manchester’s the best city in the world, and I’ve written an album from there about that perspective. If they don’t get it, that’s on them, but there’s three American [fans] outside that venue right now.”
While the jury’s out on whether chippy teas will translate overseas, one thing is for certain: Hot Milk are entering their boldest and most exciting era yet, rallying with both anger and optimism.
“Maybe it’s a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing. We don’t know yet,” says Han in her own deadpan way.
“Maybe there’s a reason people aren’t putting the words ‘mushy pea’ into their lyrics…”
Corporation P.O.P is released June 27 via Music For Nations. They headline the Kerrang! Stage at Slam Dunk Festival on May 24 and 25 in Hatfield and Leeds – get your tickets now.
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