late night drive home have never known a world without internet — without access to the endless stream of joy, sorrow, and titillation that we all tune in and tune out to on the daily. In many ways, the guys can’t extricate themselves from that reality, but they’re trying to grapple with it. The culmination of that, then, is the buoyant yet ominous as I watch my life online, the band’s debut album on Epitaph. “The record is a critique and a meta representation of the current online landscape: a whole new world or giant united country that connects us between cities, forcing us to be online. Instant gratification is at our fingertips — likes, follows, and entertainment a click away,” says guitarist Juan “Ockz” Vargas. “It shows the listener how we grew up in the early days of peak internet — how we saw it all unfold. We want to give our perspective on the internet while creating art alongside it.” late night drive home was born in El Paso, Texas, and Chaparral, New Mexico, hardworking communities where the collars were mostly blue — a quality that the band would bring to their music as self-taught craftsmen. Comprising guitarist Juan “Ockz” Vargas, singer Andre Portillo, drummer Brian Dolan, and bassist Freddy Baca, the entirely self-taught quartet released their first EP as a full band, 2021’s Am I sinking or Am I swimming?, and blew up with the single “Stress Relief,” a blast of early-Aughts indie that racked in tens of millions of streams. Their first pull compilation of songs, How Are We Feeling? dropped in 2022, and after signing with Epitaph in 2023 — and releasing 2024’s grunge-inspired EP I'll remember you for the same feeling you gave me as i slept — they found themselves playing stages their indie idols previously shredded: Coachella, Shaky Knees, Austin City Limits, and Kilby Block Party. Since the end of the pandemic, though, the band has been dreaming up as I watch my life online. “Sonically the record is expertly produced — it was the first work we put out that was recorded in professional studios and not our bedrooms,” Vargas says about working with producer Sonny Diperri. “Topically, the album is about the internet. As a Gen-Z band, we want to give an accurate representation of how it feels to be always online. Our generation is forced to care so much about its online identity, it’s like ‘your profile is as important as your outfit.’” The resulting suite of tracks is a series of online vignettes that hammers home the band’s message: the photos on your phone shouldn’t be your identity; your posts aren’t your inner monologue.
In making their third record, Hex Key, Mamalarky spent entire seasons hunched over guitars and obscure synthesizers, their long hair sweeping over strings or covering concentrated eyes. The band recorded takes in between the sounds of passing ice cream trucks and yowling stray cats in their LA home studio, a tight but prolific living room. Hex Key is a document of perseverance, of going for the gold while somehow remaining totally aware of one’s own vulnerabilities. These effervescent, swirling songs chronicle vivid desires crashing against real-life limitations but finding a way to keep burning anyway. That tension between anguish and resilience, between performed aloofness and brutal honesty, drives the music, imbues it with a compelling intensity. Over the last 8 years, the quartet’s members have lived in Austin, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and have established a bond that they acknowledge is rare. “We have an unmatched level of trust in each other,” drummer Dylan Hill says. “There is no air of professionalism. It's literally just four friends hanging out and getting to the bottom of something.” Given their closeness, Mamalarky are able to fight like family, not necessarily with each other, but for the music, to make it the best it can be. Whereas their last album, Pocket Fantasy, was exploratory and free-flowing, the songs on Hex Key are the result of absolute devotion and fine tuning. It’s the kind of attention to detail that can only happen when the four bandmates are working alone together, uninterrupted by producers, engineers, or any outside influences. “It’s never ‘kick your feet up, let’s see what happens,” guitarist and singer Livvy Bennett says. “We’re always staring each other deeply in the eyes saying ‘Let’s make this next take incredible.’ We never settle.” The band is so committed to their craft that Hill even recorded the drums for “#1 Best of All Time” amidst an intense bout of poison ivy. The determination he felt in the moment manifested itself in the song’s frantic-but-focused percussion, he says.