“I wanted to write a song that felt like WAP for fans of heavy music”: Inside RedHook’s new album Mutation

Just 18 months removed from their debut album Postcard From A Living Hell, Aussie alt.rock crew RedHook have just dropped the Mutation LP. Featuring some familiar faces in Holding Absence and Alpha Wolf, RedHook explore toxic relationships, sexual empowerment and witchcraft through 11 explosive tracks.

Here, vocalist Emmy Mack takes us through Mutation one song at a time, diving into the stories and themes behind their creation, and why she dedicated one to a love of hot-tubs. And nothing else.

“Pyromaniac opens the LP on a catalytic moment: you’re standing alone in the wreckage of your past mistakes, feeling on the edge of a complete breakdown, and making a desperate decision to change before it kills you.

“The lyrics are all about recognising you have a problem, admitting you can’t fix it alone, and reaching out for help. I wrote this song about my mental health struggles, but even though it’s filled with a lot of very real pain, I wanted the underlying message to give people hope.

“I really love the little lyrical switch in the final chorus – ‘Please someone give me the hard truth / I wanna be fireproof / I’ve already burned more bridges black than a pyromaniac.’ I guess the underlying message is that just because you feel like you’ve burned your whole world down, it doesn’t mean you can’t start fresh – kind of in the same way a burst of new growth always happens in nature after a forest fire. That’s why we picked this song to open the LP; it really sets the scene for how trauma and disaster can become a catalyst for positive change, growth, mutation.

“Musically, Pyromaniac takes a lot of its cues from hip-hop with that swinging groove that drives the big riff. But we really wanted to hit people with a curveball in the chorus. I’m super proud of the topline melody, I feel like it could belong in a Disney movie – if it wasn’t for all the F-bombs!”

“Following on from Pyromaniac, Breaking Up With doubles down on themes of self-betterment, but this time with a lot more hope, joy and celebration. This song is pretty much the antithesis of our most popular single, Bad Decisions. Rather than just ruminating on feeling like a total piece of shit, it’s about breaking that cycle of self-hate, forgiving your past mistakes, and just deciding to be a bit bloody kinder to yourself! Lyrically, it takes the piss out of break-up clichés to symbolise ending that toxic relationship with yourself.

“Craig [Wilkinson, guitar] wrote the instrumental with the intention of it being a big, fun, saxophone circle-pit party track that we could play live. There’s big early 2000s pop vibes on some of the vocal hooks too – I was definitely channelling a bit of Britney in the verses!”

“You’ve heard of a bad bitch anthem? Well this is our bad witch anthem! HEXXX sends the LP into rage mode with another big vibe switch, drawing musical inspo from alt.pop artists like Ashnikko and Rico Nasty, as well as heavy d’n’b acts like Pendulum, while lyrically referencing a bunch of classic witchy movies like The Craft and The Wizard Of Oz.

“To me, this song is all about fearlessly enforcing boundaries in relationships – something I’ve always struggled to do – and not being afraid to walk away if someone disrespects yours. It’s heavily inspired by one of my best friends Brooke, who is just the fiercest queen. She knows her damn worth and isn’t afraid to stand up for herself, or cut anyone off if they don’t bring light to her life, which is an attitude that just inspires me so fucking much.

“She’s also a bit of a white witch. White witches don’t actually cast hexes or curses, but when someone messes with her she’ll jokingly say stuff like, 'Bitch, keep going and I won’t just curse you, I’ll curse your ancestors!’ so I added that line into the chorus as a little tribute to her!

“HEXXX was already one of my favourite songs off the LP, but then Vana’s feature just made me love it so much more! I’m completely obsessed with Vana as an artist and it’s been so amazing getting to know her and to work with her, she’s just the fucking best. Listen out for verse two where she spits the most fire Wizard Of Oz bars you’ve ever heard in your life!”

“I think this might be my favourite chorus on the whole LP! This song explores themes of accountability in relationship breakdowns, using a Frankenstein's monster metaphor to tell a toxic love story in three chapters, and from two opposite perspectives.

“What begins as a fairytale romance rapidly devolves into a nightmare as one partner begins to display increasingly more possessive and controlling behaviour. But the bridge then whacks us with a plot twist by revealing that this emotional abuse could have actually stemmed from the other partner being dishonest and unfaithful, thus begging the question, 'Who is the real monster?' and covertly suggesting that it might not be quite that simple.

“Ultimately, this song is about me owning my shit for a past relationship that became toxic AF. During the break-up, I was guilty of privately indulging in that kind of ‘victim’ mentality, but now that I'm a bit older and wiser, I feel like it's important to take responsibility for my own fuck-ups too.

“Also, it would be remiss of me not to talk about how incredible Lucas from Holding Absence is on this song! I wrote the vocals specifically with a male feature in mind and Lucas was number one on our wishlist to collab. When he said he loved the song and wanted to do it, we all squealed like excited little school kids!”

“Bomb.com is basically just a big fun rager that we wrote for the mosh-pit. It incorporates elements of nu-metal and hardcore, but my rapping style tends to skew a little bit Nicki Minaj. Craig also added these really sick synths for extra hype that were inspired by that Far East Movement song, Like A G6.

“Lyrically, this song is just a real sassy diss track about an egomaniacal dude in the music industry who likes to talk a lot of shit, particularly about female-fronted bands. Lame AF behaviour that we felt compelled to take the piss out of. Fun fact: the lyrics also cheekily reference a Stand Atlantic song about the same individual.”

“This one’s a big, fun, summer party rock song! I’ll be real with you, though – it is literally just about a hot-tub. Even though the lyrics will probably make you think it’s about, uh, something else.

“We wrote this song during a fun little writing getaway in some rural corner of New South Wales, Australia last year. I can’t even remember what the suburb was called! We just booked the AirBnB because it was cheap and had a hot-tub. While we were soaking in said tub one night, our producer Stevie [Knight] started jokingly singing what would become the ‘hot tub hook’, and we were all having a laugh about it when he added with grave sincerity, ‘Oi Em, do you reckon you could actually make this song about a hot-tub but, you know, make the lyrics clever?’

“I had no idea how I was supposed to make a song about a hot-tub clever! But I’d just written Cannibal and was feeling very much in my sexual empowerment era, so my solution was to stack the lyrics with as many cheeky sexual innuendos as I could.

“So I guess in a way this song is still very sexually empowering! But it’s also really just about, you know, a hot-tub.”

“Unlike Hot Tub, this is a song specifically about sex. Blowjobs, actually. A dark, kinky industrial metal stomper about the joys of giving good head. But digging deeper, it’s also about femme sexual reclamation and liberation following trauma.

“I wanted to write a song that felt like WAP for fans of heavy music. An empowering metal anthem that would help me smash some of the stigma and shame around sex that I felt for a long time after surviving SA, and hopefully inspire other women to do the same.

“I’m so grateful to Lochie Keogh and the legends in Alpha Wolf for backing this vision and for absolutely crushing this feature! I was honestly so nervous to release Cannibal, but the reaction to it has been so overwhelmingly positive that it’s blown me away – pun 100 per cent intended!”

“After six months of living my most mentally well, self-caring, sexually-empowered, boundary-setting life and being in the happiest and healthiest relationship I’d ever experienced, it became increasingly, painfully evident that said relationship was no longer working. And after trying to work through the issues with honesty, empathy and respect, it became clear that things weren’t going to change, and I realised that if I genuinely valued myself and knew my worth, I had to leave, regardless of how painful that decision was.

“Hurt Like Hell articulates that, ‘Oh, fuck,’ moment with a lot of angst and frustration, plus a dirty swing riff and carnival clown synths.

“I guess the important thing to note though is that the old Emmy would probably have stayed in that unhappy situation and swallowed her pain out of pure fear. So this is still a song about growth, but nobody ever said growth don’t hurt like hell.”

“Fans of the heavier stuff probably won’t like this song as much but I don’t really mind. This one means a lot me and the folks who get it will get it.

“Party/Zombie is the sound of the dancefloor on emo-punk prom night. It’s funky, dancy, heavy and full of emotion.

“This is a song about laughing while your heart breaks, about boogying through the apocalypse, and about somehow still managing to be the life of the party – even when you feel completely and utterly dead inside.”

“Scream 2 is a conceptual sequel to our 2021 single Cure 4 Psycho, where I likened my experience of surviving narcissistic abuse to Sidney Prescott surviving Ghostface in the Scream movies.

“The horror movie plot continues on this song, which is about the aftermath of escaping the narcissist. As anyone out there who has experienced NA will know, once you take away the narc’s power and control by removing their access to you, they’ll often continue trying to harm you by whatever means remain available to them: vindictive mind games, smear campaigns, sending ‘flying monkeys’ to fuck with you on their behalf, or weaponising your trauma and vulnerabilities against you in whatever malicious way they possibly can.

“This is a song about refusing to let them draw more blood. Musically, it’s also probably the most ambitious and chaotic song on the record, veering between metal, hardcore and anthemic pop-punk. I was definitely channelling a bit of System Of A Down energy in that first verse, too!”

“Tourist closes out the LP on a big fat note of defiance. This song started out as a topline melody and lyrics – inspired by a quote from the show Parks & Rec – that I’d voice memoed to myself while I was away on tour nursing a broken heart and a broken mind. But when we jumped into the studio to start properly working on it, my producer Stevie made it infinitely cooler by changing up the key and adding layers of dark synths inspired by Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise and some sick Red Hot Chili Peppers-style bass pops.

“This song is about me holding my head up high, raising a middle-finger squarely at an ex who lied and cheated during an overseas holiday, and then moonwalking out of his life.

“Making Tourist the closer was a bit of a Christopher Nolan move, too, since the heartbreak that inspired it was one of the big catalysts for my personal growth era that gave birth to all the songs on Mutation. But I loved the idea of the final lyric of the LP being, ‘Hope you had a nice trip!’

“I really hope you did.”

Mutation is out now via Adventure Cat Records

Read this next:

• Stand Atlantic: “I’m so glad I got myself back – this album literally saved me”
• Holding Absence: “Music is and always has been my life – it’s the only thing that’s ever understood me”
• Scene Queen: “It’s always been about being a conservative person’s worst nightmare”