If nothing else, it’s hard not to be impressed by The Hunna’s work ethic.
Let us break this down for you. In the first three weeks of 2018, they’ve played a sold-out UK headline tour – including two dates at London’s Brixton Academy, no less – and announced another UK headline tour for May.
They’ve made their sophomore record, Dare, available for pre-order, and released a brand new single to mark the occasion. Heck, they’ve even managed to find the time to ensure that their Instagram page remains – as we are reliably informed that ‘the youth’ say – ‘on point’.
Now, we don’t know about you, but we think that it’s pretty impressive that they’ve managed to cram so much into such a short space of time. Do they not sleep? Or do they exist purely in a Spinal Tapian haze of coffee, Red Bull, and vitamin tablets? Hell, have they gone so far as to commission a small army of leather-jacketed robotic replicas to make it possible for the band to be in several places at once? We may never know for sure.
Alas, we digress. The fact remains, though, that ‘cramming a lot of good things into a short space of time’ is pretty much how The Hunna do everything.
Don’t believe us? For a start, how very rude of you. Do you not trust us?
Secondly: if you’re that unconvinced of The Hunna‘s ability to fill their time with various brilliant things, why don’t you just head down to one of their live shows?
We went down to their set at Bristol’s O2 Academy, and we couldn’t believe how many great tracks they managed to squeeze into such a short space of time. From the moment they hit the stage, it was hard not to be impressed by the ferocity with which Ryan Potter and co. sped through an hour-long set of some of the best indie-pop songs we’ve heard in the last few years. It takes balls to place your three most popular songs – namely, Bonfire, We Could Be, and She’s Casual – in the middle of your setlist, but when your songs are as great as The Hunna‘s, we think that it’s a risk you should be happy to take.
In fact, their habit of squeezing great things into small packages is pretty well represented by their songs themselves.
They may not break the mould in terms of their formula – any die-hard fan of the standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus song structure are going to be well and truly won over by The Hunna – but they do manage to squeeze a great guitar riff, an arena-sized chorus, and at least two or three earworm-worthy hooks into each and every song they air on this miserable Bristolian evening.
If that’s not the sign of a great band, then we’re really not sure what is.