Track By Track: Hot Hail! – Hope In Hell

After reviewing their Hope In Hell album recently, we decided to approach Billy Sigil, aka Hot Hail!, for their take on the album. Many thanks to Billy for taking part at such a busy time post-release.

Commitment

There’s an idea from Vaudeville that’s loosely referred to as a “‘Mouth Full Of Blood’ Laugh” – You do a pratfall, but you bite the tip of your tongue off; you really hurt yourself, but when you come up with blood pouring out of your mouth, the audience laughs harder than they ever have before.

That’s what going through the motions of supposedly normal life feels like right now – performing for an audience of monstrous idiots while in a state of obvious injury. But there’s a certain lunatic resilience in just laughing right back at the world and barreling through. Committing to the bit, making them laugh their ugly laughs until they choke on it. In the end, there are many days when the best you can say is “The world might end me, but I won’t end myself.”

Flesh

I think the most poignant part of this song snuck up on me in a way after it was recorded – that the AI in this song is looking back on us, going, “You had bodies; you got to really and truly exist, and you did this with it? Really?”

We are all essentially meat sponges full of lightning that have somehow developed the ability to dream. Leave any concept of the divine out of that completely, and it’s still a goddamn miracle. But we’re so obsessed with the idea of our ego living on forever in some way that we ignore the gift of this temporary, fallible, wonky flesh we get to exist in.

Silver Sliver

I wanted this to be a bit more of a vibe, than a message, but I still can’t help myself. The vampire metaphor is overused, but here it really ended up being about the way that very obviously dysfunctional people attract lampreys of their own that sort of attach to them and reinforce them.

Another big influence was a book series called Anno Dracula by Kim Newman, which is an alternate history / shared fictional universe spanning the 19th to 21st centuries in which all these fictional vampires from other literature are running around, but the writing is so character-driven that everyone feels very believable and small and flawed. I kind of wanted to write a song that would be a #1 hit in the 1985 of that reality.

So, this is a dorky song about vampires with a Weird Al level Madonna joke shoved into it, that is pretending that it’s super, super cool.

Article Of Faith

In some ways it’s a bit on the nose. There’s a frustration to this song, because I know that the only people listening to it are people just as horrified as me right now. And if the people on the other side of things heard this, they would just laugh or somehow make it about how they’re really the oppressed ones.

So of course, it’s preaching to the choir. I think this was the darkest I could go on this album because of that – everything in this is something the people I care about know already; I don’t need to spend an entire album rubbing their noses in that.

Hope In Hell

I wrote this song in the first few weeks after the 2025 inauguration. Anybody with a functioning heart and brain knew then that this was not going to be good, but I don’t think we could have guessed exactly how bad, how quickly.

I don’t want to write revolutionary anthems. I adored The Clash in my teens and twenties, but no one ever actually started a revolution because of them. They just started other bands that sang about revolution. Including me. At a certain point, the art of revolutionary posturing becomes a placebo against actual action. And what we need more than anything is action right now.

But this song is really about how I don’t know what that action is. We’re so fractious on this side of things; we’re so much better at hurting each other than hurting the people who are actively trying to obliterate us.

“I love my people, and I love my world” – the world I’m a part of with them – but a lot of the time I don’t particularly trust us not to sabotage our own survival. If anything gives me hope, it’s the rare times that I see people within the big amorphous leftist / progressive umbrella putting aside their ultra-specific curated bullshit and working together to not end up in a goddamn camp or on the wrong end of a drone strike.

Needle

The more I listen to the album, now that it’s finished, I think this one might be my favorite track, on a purely musical level. When everything is digital and electronic, a lot of the work is just sifting through your soundbanks and trying things until something clicks, but I sometimes listen back and am like, wait, how did I even write that?

But this one feels so sleek – I love the vocals and lyrics too; they mean a lot to me, but I feel like you really could pull the vocals entirely, and this would be a soundtrack for something I loved as a kid. My hope in the next few years is that I can move in the direction of making that kind of music for other people’s projects even more.

Joy

This is one of the few straightforward love songs I’ve ever written. There’s a sort of ridiculous irony in finding a very stable and mature and loving relationship in the midst of everything collapsing, and that’s part of what this is about. But it’s also about the fact that I’m very prone to seeing all the ways that things are going to go wrong, in the world and in my life, and how important it is not to drag someone else down into that. Joy isn’t a revolutionary act, but it can be an act of defiance, both against the horrible political forces in the world, and against our own self-destructive natures.

Musically, it’s a bit of that too. I can only make so much doom and darkness and skronk, so this is a bit of a defiant wink to being mired in that.

In Time

If Joy is a defiant wink to the darkness, this is a full-on Matrix-style jumping backwards out the window with both middle fingers out to it.

Ironically, this is about one of the darkest things on the album, personally. About 9 years ago, my whole life fell apart, and I came very close to doing something very stupid and very permanent. Luckily, I literally stepped back from that ledge, and very slowly rebuilt my life with the help of mental health treatment and sobriety and people who stayed with me.

But there is this idea in magical practice of a Guardian Angel that isn’t something external; it’s the idea that you exist on a continuum of your entire life, and that in times of happiness, you can reach back to yourself at your lowest and extend kindness and grace to move forward. I don’t literally believe that, but I like that metaphor.

This song is me reaching back to myself at my lowest point, telling them to step back from the ledge, that it will be worth it to keep moving. It’s something I owed to that me, and it’s deeply personal, but I also hope that anybody listening can pick up the energy of that in whatever their own lowest point is.

Something Good

This song came into my life right before the pandemic hit, and it’s been a source of joy and hope and comfort for a long time. I think, in some ways, I needed this cover on the album, and needed to end on it, because it’s so far from what I’m capable of writing. It’s just this forthright, direct, seemingly simple thing that actually is very complex – “Take something bad and make it into something good.” That’s very easy to say, very hard to do. We are living through that. It’s what we’re all trying to figure out right now.

And Paul Haig, just in general, is such a fantastic musician, and criminally under-recognized. I do not have very much of a following, but I do hope that this cover raises the profile of his other work at least a little bit.

Hope In Hell is out now and can be downloaded on Bandcamp and streamed on Spotify and YouTube. There’s a release party for the album at Baba Yaga in Seattle on the 26th of April – head to Instagram for event updates.