Mallory Hawk takes a bouncy new wave detour on “Superhighway”

On the first playthrough of Hawk’s debut solo record, it’s impossible to predict the shiny post-punk of “Superhighway” in the tracklist. Opening cuts like “The Mirror” are owed to cathartic slowcore, plus there’s the fingerpicking Americana of “Four O’Clocks”, and even egg punk on “Caretaker”. A galloping bassline that drives The Cure-like “Superhighway” will catch anyone off guard. The effortlessly replayable tune came from Hawk’s reinvigorated new wave phase during the pandemic. “My friend Joe Sutkowski from Dirt Buyer sent me a video of the band Alyans performing on Soviet public access television in the ’80s,” she recalls. “I wanted to support musicians the best way I could, so I was ordering a lot of cassettes from Russia and Belarus.” One may expect the song was first written with synthesisers, but that’s not true. “I was using my guitar in a synth style and layering the song until it turned into the dance hit that I wanted it to be,” Hawk explains with a laugh. Her guitar and rock music, broadly, are the main through lines that give Chinook its eclectic sonic identity. For Hawk, that passion stems from multiple times in her life. During childhood, she listened to a lot of co...