Hum Is No Longer the Greatest Overlooked Band of the 1990s

The Sound of Young Champaign

No record has stuck with me for so long the way You’d Prefer an Astronaut by the band Hum has. Back in 1995, when I was just a 14-year-old scamming mail-order companies out of free records, I’d picked it along with six or seven other CDs by taping the required penny on the piece of paper, then signing my name believing that, as a minor, they couldn’t force me to pay anything else required by the “membership” I was agreeing to. I believe that particular batch of scammed records was where my copies of Monster by R.E.M. and Whip-Smart by Liz Phair came from—two great records that I recall older fans being dismissive of at the time—and I’d picked the Hum album because their single, “Stars,” had been played just enough on the radio that I was curious to hear more. It was this insane combination of quiet and loud that I hadn’t experienced much of as a music fan, but that I’d soon learn was a trick employed by a number of bands throughout the decade. Some were great, others maybe just had the luck of getting Steve Albini to say yes to recording them, so at least the production was good. The quiet into loud thing was a great unifier for countless bands that spanned, and often transcended, labels like indie, post rock, post hardcore, and emo, something I’d eventually learn could be traced back to at least 1991, when Loveless by My Bloody Valentine and Spiderland by Slint both came out. It took me another year or so to get caught up on those other albums because most of my friends were getting busy starting ska bands, doing drugs at raves in cornfields, or being straight edge and not doing any drugs at all. Since the ‘90s was a buffet of subcultures, I dabbled in all of those things at one point or another as well, but I always liked heavy sounds, and You’d Prefer an Astronaut expanded my idea of what that could mean.

I first heard “Stars” on the radio station Q101. If you grew up in the Chicagoland area between the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, and you liked any sort of music that was placed under the “alternative” category during those years, then your dial landed on WKQX at some point. If you eventually drifted towards more “underground” music, then it’s also likely you rebelled against the station and any other corporate entity that would dare play the music you didn’t want other people finding out about. That happened with me, but before I became a shitty little snob, I basically spent all my hours at home with Q101 on, usually keeping a cassette tape loaded in case I wanted to record songs that I could listen to over and over. That’s where I first heard everything from Sonic Youth to the Lemonheads, Fishbone, Meatmen, and Veruca Salt. When I think about what an embarrassment of riches the radio, as well as MTV of that era (especially 120 Minutes), offered, it’s hard to believe I took it for granted—then I remember there’s a reason they say things like “Youth is wasted on the young.”

Like its name, track three from Hum’s third album is a celestial affair. Lyrically, it’s a rough comedown, with Matt Talbott singing about what sounds like a girlfriend who he worries, “I think I finally broke her.” He’s looking around for her and finds her out back, “sitting naked; looking up and looking dead.” I don’t know if she’s in the middle of a breakdown, on drugs, or possibly both. The song that precedes “Stars” on the album, “The Pod,” is almost certainly about those things, and feels very much like it came from the mind of Gus Van Sant or Denis Johnson with Talbott singing, “I need this fucking fix and I beg her to pick from—one of a million ways to feel no pain.” I don’t like to assume things, and can’t speak to the experiences of Talbott or the members of Hum, but knowing what I know now about the era it came out of, I can’t think of another album that so perfectly captures the real feelings of the first-half of the 1990s.

You’d Prefer… came out when major labels were still looking to replicate the success of Nirvana and other bands from the Pacific Northwest who appreciated albums from the SST Records catalog and Black Sabbath equally, but they’d also seen the success of Green Day’s Dookie. So there was this really weird mix of new songs in the air by bands that sounded like C-grade versions of Pearl Jam (hello, Live), a few former indie bands who found success having a hit single for their major label (Soul Asylum), and others who were considered “sell-outs” so people turned their backs on what ended up being their best overall albums. Yes, I’m talking about Jawbreaker. Hum felt like they’d come out of nowhere, both figuratively and literally. They weren’t connected to some scene the majors were looking to excavate for whatever morsels they could turn up in hopes of finding “The next Seattle”; they came from Champaign, Illinois. Personally, I have a a soft spot for the town since I’ve got family who went to and rooted for the University of Illinois, but that’s generally the only reason anybody even knows about the place. As far as I know, it was Hum and Poster Children, another band who also had a small bit of success in the post-Reagan years, but are mostly remembered by people like me who may have heard them on Q101 or saw their name on a flyer for a show at the Metro. Great bands, but not exactly a thriving scene. They also didn’t share some sort of unique sound that somebody might hear and go, “They’re from Champaign.” (In a funny twist, American Football, who would help close out the 20th century with their 1999 debut, were also from Champaign, and similary saw their stature and influence grow after they broke up.)

Sonically, I can’t think of anything else that sounded like Hum, at least not on the radio. The closest thing in my mind was “Savory” by Jawbox getting a little airplay in ‘94 when the D.C. band’s major label album came out, but even having a little extra cash after ditching Dischord for Atlantic couldn’t smooth out that band’s hardcore roots. As much as I cringe using the term, their For Your Own Special Sweetheart is very much a post-hardcore album, where Hum and their 1995 record sounds like it was made by dudes who’d been ripping bongs for years. The closest comparison I can make is how J Mascis and Lou Barlow were playing hardcore in Deep Wound while listening to Neil Young on tour, and that eventually turned into the music they’d make in Dinosaur Jr. Hard and heavy, but also incredibly beautiful. More sativa than indica; high and chill, but able to rock.

Almost exactly a year after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, it’s also a perfectly confused bum trip of an album. The songs on You’d Prefer an Astronaut are all about something in a time when people thought Pavement made it acceptable to just sing/scream about whatever and people would (and sometimes did) love it. Like I said, I think there’s a lot on the album about drugs and people dealing with their relationships and lives breaking down, but there’s also just this overall feeling of What the fuck is going on here and what is this life that stretches throughout the nine tracks. And what was happening in 1995? It feels like such an unimportant year when you first hear it, but then you go look at Wikipedia and you’re reminded that O.J. Simpson’s trial was going on, white, American-born, anti-government terrorists blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the internet had been privatized by corporations, and it was the first year people could buy things on Amazon. Just those things alone changed the course of basically everything as we knew it, but in 1995, you could only go “Woah…” because it was all uncharted territory. Things were getting weird, but you had no way of knowing how much weirder they’d get, and the sound of a modem dialing up to connect us with countless strangers and limitless information on the “world wide web” was new, exciting, and still a little scary. Maybe it’s because I was listening to it so much then, but You’d Prefer an Astronaut sounds like all of that. It sounds like going outside, standing in a front yard, looking up at the sky, and not even having the option to pull something out of your pocket to tell you whether you should expect continued sunshine or rain. There’s this creeping feeling that I get from listening to it that reminds me of reading DeLillo’s White Noise for the first time, like there’s something ominous beyond the horizon, but it takes a bit to figure out what exactly it is. It sounds like having time to yourself—too much time, sometimes. In some ways it’s comforting, and I say I wish I could go back to that time, but when I’m being honest with myself I can admit that I don’t know how I’d handle it.

Hum came and went with the ‘90s. Downward Is Heavenward, their excellent follow-up to You’d Prefer an Astronaut, charted at #37, and sold 30,000 copies in 1997. Even after the success of “Stars” and the previous album, that number was considered disappointing in the industry, and their label moved onto whatever they believed could go gold or platinum. Hum broke up in 2000. It was almost like they were too perfect for this shitty new century, except something funny happened: people started catching up with what the band had done after they’s called it quits. You could hear Hum’s influence all over the place, from the Deftones to the mid-late hardcore and emo scene that Turnstile came out of. The band would play reunion shows every now and then, before getting back together and recording their heaviest album in 2020, Inlet. Next week, they’re headlining both nights of the Slide Away series, featuring Nothing, Chapterhouse, and (for one night) Swirlies. It’s an interesting pairing because you get a band like Nothing, who definitely owe a debt to Hum and other loud guitar bands from the ‘90s, while the reunited Chapterhouse come out of the late-1980s and early-1990s British shoegaze scene Hum may have felt at home alongside if they’d linked up. The shows are at Brooklyn Paramount, which, since it reopened as a concert venue in 2024, has been one of the best mid-sized venues to see music in. It’s a vast, old hall that opened as a movie theater in the Roaring ‘20s, and the place has a grand feel from the moment you walk in. As somebody who likes to call any live music experience a show, I definitely feel like I’ve seen more concerts there. Hum has finally been getting the recognition they deserve for a few years now, but playing on a big stage, filling a beautiful, cavernous room with their sound feels like what they should have been doing all along.