Everyone’s got an airport story. A stop through an airport is a green light to act undignified: It might be the only place in the world where you can drink a cocktail with your breakfast and then nap on the floor afterwards with no repercussions. It’s both crowded and lonely, neither here nor there. You’re only at an airport because you’re trying to go somewhere else farther away.
I imagine that Marquette, the most populous city of Michigan’s frigid Upper Peninsula, can feel a bit like an airport sometimes. “Imagine” is the operative word there — I’ve never been to Marquette, and judging by the way the members of Liquid Mike talk about it, their hometown doesn’t offer much incentive for non-Michiganders to come visit. Bandleader Mike Maple started the alt-rock project back in 2020, when he was working as a USPS carrier. He wrote lyrics and guitar licks to pass the time during slower shifts, which were plentiful, because it’s Marquette after all. From the looks of Liquid Mike’s Bandcamp page, though, not a second went wasted: This Friday, they’ll share Hell Is An Airport, their sixth album in just four years.
Maybe Maple’s scrappy blue-collar origin story contributes to some of Liquid Mike’s appeal, but you don’t get Indie Rock Twitter famous overnight just for maintaining proletariat occupations. Back in 2023, online word-of-mouth about Liquid Mike spread like wildfire, giving the band plenty of new eyes and ears when their excellent Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot arrived in early 2024. Less than two years later, Hell Is An Airport keeps the momentum striding.
Maple’s songwriting approach isn’t too dependent on verse-chorus-verse structures, instead seemingly aspiring to pack as many hooks as he can into 14 two-minute whirlwinds that often bleed together seamlessly. It’s a sonic culmination of all the ’90s touchstones people tend to reference when discussing Liquid Mike — a little Superdrag here, a little Blink-182 there — and it reminds me of Joyce Manor in its brevity-to-quality ratio. The songwriting alone is impressive, but it shines even brighter thanks to Maple’s keen engineering ear informed by childhood favorites like Nirvana and AC/DC. Recorded entirely at his home studio, Hell Is An Airport is punchy and dynamic, replete with vocal harmonies over crunchy guitar chords that scratch a certain itch in a way few of Liquid Mike’s peers can accomplish.
Like a lot of the best songs put to tape by his hero Robert Pollard, Maple’s lyrics tend to come from an observational, everyman point of view, mining significance out of regular mundanities. A minor sledding accident, for example, becomes a rude existential awakening on the skate-punk ripper “Lit From The Wrong End,” while passing time is measured in overripe produce on the Cars-indebted “Double Dutch.” The untrained ear won’t pick up on explicit references to Marquette, however, as Maple’s reflections on humanity aren’t tied to specificities as much as universal experiences, like driving past a barren shopping mall or chopping it up with the deadbeat millennial practicing vape tricks in his busted sedan.
Hell Is An Airport, Maple has explained, “deals a lot with themes surrounding feeling stuck and unable to crawl out.” The characters he encounters across the album are bored and unfulfilled, and Maple’s narrator doesn’t shy away from suggesting that they’re the problem: “You’re the worm on your own hook that you try to get away from so badly,” he waxes therapeutic on the closing title track, cacophonous cymbal splashes and zippy bass lines aplenty. The subtly-groovy chiller “AT&T,” meanwhile, was inspired by someone Maple knew personally, a lonely employee of a certain cell service provider who punches holes in the wall as readily as he clocks out of a shift: “Wake up the bugs/ In the drywall, once you witness/ Your little ant farm grow/ I guess you’re not alone!”
But Maple’s witty empathy keeps Hell Is An Airport from feeling too bleak or misanthropic: “Nothing here ever gets too bad/ Just don’t go looking for an explanation/ It never turns out good,” he belts on “Groucho Marx” — the type of commiserative sardonicism that might make the song’s namesake proud — before admitting that he, too, is sometimes tempted by the passivity that evidently surrounds him. “You’re gonna curl up and die?/ OK, so am I.” But the album also seems to ask: Is it worse to succumb to a cycle of nihilism, or achieve your dreams only to realize they’re not your dreams after all? “You’ve gotten slow/ You’ll never play again/ You never thought/ It would last all that long,” Maple ponders on the anthemic single “Claws.” Hell Is An Airport couches all of his commentary in the understanding that it’s frustrating to feel like you can’t get where you want to be, even if — and especially if — that stagnation is due to your own missteps. It’s on you if you want to catch the next flight out of here.
Hell Is An Airport is out 9/12.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Algernon Cadwallader’s Trying Not To Have A Thought
• King Princess’ Girl Violence
• Michael Hurley’s final album Broken Homes and Gardens
• Jens Lekman’s Songs For Other Peoples Weddings
• Guerilla Toss’ You’re Weird Now
• Ed Sheeran’s Play
• Fruit Bats’ Baby Man
• Kassa Overall’s CREAM
• Mud Grief’s Mud Grief
• Nyxy Nyx’s Cult Classics Vol. 1
• Snuggle’s Goodbyehouse
• Twenty One Pilots’ Breach
• Legss’ Unreal
• Bass Drum Of Death’s SIX
• Ariel Pink’s With You Every Night
• Ruston Kelly’s Pale, Through The Window
• Calum Scott’s Avenoir
• Robin Kester’s Dark Sky Reserve
• Gruff Rhys’ Dim Probs
• Raquel Martins’ LONDON, WHEN ARE U GONNA FEEL LIKE HOME?
• Nevertel’s Start Again
• Baxter Dury’s Allbarone
• Maruja’s Pain To Power
• Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Perimenopop
• Jade’s That’s Showbiz Baby
• Hauser’s Cinema
• The Chameleons’ Arctic Moon
• Cafuné’s Bite Reality
• Hazlett’s last night you said you missed me
• Emma Swift’s The Resurrection Game
• The Paper Kites’ If You Go There, I Hope You Find It
• Frost Children’s SISTER
• The Hidden Cameras’ Bronto
• Mimi Webb’s Confessions
• LEISURE’s Welcome To The Mood
• Whitney K’s Bubble
• Rafiq Bhatia’s Environments
• Will Paquin’s Hahaha
• Josh Ritter’s I Believe In You, My Honeydew
• Ho99o9’s Tomorrow We Escape
• Joviale’s Mount Crystal
• Asher White’s 8 Tips For Full Catastrophe Living
• Mark William Lewis’ Mark William Lewis
• Between The Buried And Me’s The Blue Nowhere
• Spite House’s Desertion
• Imaginary People’s Alibi
• Acopia’s Blush Response
• Carson McHone’s Pentimento
• Sydney Minsky Sargeant’s Lunga
• In The Pines’ Sunbeam Dream
• Laveda’s Love, Darla
• Spandau Ballet’s Everything Is Now – Vol 1: 1978-1982 Box Set
• Your Smith’s The Rub
• Warren Haynes’ The Whisper Sessions
• Public Circuit’s Modern Church
• Paul Muldoon & Rogue Oliphant’s Visible From Space
• Paul Cebar’s Paul Cebar
• jasmine.4.t’s You Are The Morning (YBT Deluxe)
• Matt Maeson’s A Quiet & Harmless Living
• Matt Bachmann’s Compost Karaoke
• Matteo Bocelli’s Falling In Love
• Jensen Interceptor’s Interception
• Mitch Rowland’s Whistling Pie
• Parcels’ Loved
• Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required (Fully Tailored) Box Set
• saturdays at your place’s These Things Happen
• mei ehara’s All About McGuffin
• Hide’s SPIT OR SWALLOW EVERY SOUL WILL TASTE DEATH
• Cazwell’s HITS ALL OVER YOUR FACE [The Peace Bisquit Collection]
• David Bowie’s I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002-2016) Box Set
• Restraining Order’s Future Fortune
• Julia, Julia’s Sugaring A Strawberry
• Die Spitz’s Something To Consume
• Liim’s Liim Lasalle Loves You
• VENERA’s EXINFINITE
• Brent Amaker & The Rodeo’s Vaquero
• Verses GT’s Verses GT
• Modeselektor’s DJ-Kicks
• Silver Gore’s Dogs In Heaven
• Selector Dub Narcotic’s When Boys Cry
• The Sound Of Animals Fighting’s The Maiden
• Holly Palmer’s Metamorphosis
• Sweet Savage’s BANG
• Madilyn Mei’s A Thousand Songs About It All: Act 1
• Mehro’s wierdthrob
• George Riley’s More Is More
• Various Artists’ SpinalTap II: The End Continues Soundtrack
• Behemoth’s Pandemonic Incantations Deluxe Reissue
• Kiss The Tiger’s Infinite Love
• Chloe Stroll’s Bloom In The Break
• Acceptance’s Phantoms/Twenty
• Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer’s Purity
• Kara-Lis Coverdale’s A Series Of Actions In A Sphere Of Forever
• Margaret Glaspy’s The Golden Heart Protector
• TEKE::TEKE’s Hagata Delux
• The Rasmus’ Weirdo
• Peyton’s Au
• Haechan’s Taste
• Frank Hannon’s Reflections
• Space To Play’s Space To Play
• ABIR’s The Game
• Steel Beans’ Steel Beans
• Kreidler’s Early Recordings 1994-95
• Mon Rovîa’s Bloodline
• Cuco’s Ridin’ (Deluxe)
• STARSET’s SILOS
• Haram’s Why Does Paradise Begin In Hell?
• Nasty C’s Free
• Bec Lauder & The Noise’s The Vessel
• Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
• J.D. Crowe & The New South’s J.D. Crowe & The New South 50th Anniversary Expanded Edition
• John Prine’s Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings (Deluxe Edition)
• The Grateful Dead’s Blues For Allah (50th Anniversary Edition)
• Six Finger Satellite’s Severe Exposure (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
• BEC’s Dawn Of A New Dimension EP
• Iron & Wine & Ben Bridwell’s Making Good Time EP
• Hockey Dad’s The Clip EP
• Jessy Lanza’s Slapped By My Life EP
• Colorblind’s Who Sold You This Truth EP
• Jesca Hoop, Kate Stables, & Lail Arad’s The Songs Of Joni Mitchell Vol. 1 EP
• Cortis’ COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES EP
• Sunnyboyy’s Sunnyboyy EP
• Oxymorrons’ Create. Destroy. Rebuild. Repeat. EP
• Led Zeppelin’s Live E.P. EP
• Daughtry’s SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (PART TWO) EP
• NEW YORK’s Push EP
• ERNIE’s
• Lauren Lovelle’s Other Dreams EP
