On “Top of the Punx” from Hunx and His Punx’s new album Walk Out On This World, Seth “Hunx” Bogart’s tongue is planted firmly in his frequently rouged cheek as he sings of the exquisite pain of being recognized on the street. “I don’t want to be top of the punks,” he sings, but if you see him perform, you’ll wonder how he could have ever been anything else.
Rail-thin and frequently dressed in thrift-store Tom of Finland leather drag, the Tucson-born singer spent most of his 20s as a member of the famed Bay Area electropunk band Gravy Train!!!! prior to setting out with his own band at the peak of San Francisco’s fertile late-’00s garage rock scene. Nobody who saw any Hunx and His Punx shows forgot them in a rush, with Bogart’s reedy voice contrasting with the thick, earthy girl-group backing vocals of Erin Emslie and Shannon Shaw.
After 2013’s Street Punk, which swapped the John Waters kitsch of their earlier records for a more scabrous style, the band went on the backburner for a while. Bogart moved to LA and pursued a solo career, first as Hunx and then with his own name, while Shaw found international success with Shannon & the Clams, probably the biggest band to come out of the Bay Area garage-rock scene and certainly one of the most consistent.
The band decided to reunite in 2019, but one cataclysm after another kept their record Walk Out On This World from being completed, beginning with the mass shutdown of live music during the early stages of the COVID pandemic. In 2022, Shaw’s fiancé Joe Haener died in a car accident just weeks before their wedding. Then, on January 7 of this year, the Eaton Fire tore through Bogart’s home and left it severely damaged.
Given all this unhappiness, it’s a miracle the band was able to get their new music out into the world, let alone that the resulting record feels so lively. There’s a pervasive apocalyptic undercurrent, and the album ends with a salvo of explosions evocative of Dr. Strangelove, but the melodies are as cheery as ever. Shaw takes more of a presence on the mic than ever before, while Hunx’s formerly mosquito-like voice has mellowed into a cool baritone.
There’s an alternate universe in which Walk Out On This World was one of the great rock ‘n’ roll what-ifs, but it’s here, it’s great, and the Punx are performing it at the Chapel on Thu/25. 48 Hills caught up with Hunx during a brief moment of rest between legs of his current tour to discuss what’s changed for the garage rock legends in the decade-plus since their last record.
48 HILLS You told the SF Chronicle you hoped this tour would be an escape from your recent troubles. Has it worked out that way?
HUNX I was honestly dreading going on tour, and then by the end of the shows last week, I didn’t wanna go home at all.
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48 HILLS Are you feeling more pressure to work and go on tour since your house was damaged?
HUNX I wouldn’t say I’m feeling more pressure, but I feel like it’s definitely made everything much harder, and it’s definitely giving me more of an escape when I get to do things like go on tour.
48 HILLS Most of the music was written before the struggles you and Shannon went through recently. Has the meaning of the music changed at all since then for you?
HUNX I feel like our silliness and funness has a new purpose. It seems like the audiences we’ve played for have been really happy, like everyone just wants to forget everything horrible for a while.
48 HILLS How’s the tour been so far?
HUNX The shows have been so fun. We have three different costumes we alternate. We all have polka-dot looks, and we painted the polka dots ourselves. Then we have flight attendant outfits that we designed in collaboration with my friend Jessica Shade, and the other one’s just a trashy leather punk look that’s just random things we bought.
And the crowds have been going wild and crazy. I used to go on tour and be really drunk because I felt like I had to be wild. I still drink, but I’m basically sober compared to how drunk I used to be, so it’s been really fun to channel craziness and let out all the horribleness of this year out onstage in a healthy way. It feels like a major relief.
48 HILLS Was it a conscious decision not to drink or just something you’ve found yourself doing less as you get older?
HUNX I just got really tired of it. It made touring feel a lot harder. I felt like people wanted this thing from me that didn’t feel good, so I cut back. It’s been nice to have one drink instead of being all hungover the next day and getting too crazy.
48 HILLS Did you have that in mind when you were writing “Top of the Punks,” in which you talk about people wanting you to be this certain version of yourself.
HUNX I mean, it’s a really ridiculous and exaggerated version of that, being like “I can’t walk around without being recognized,” but yeah, sort of.
48 HILLS When people ask you, “Are you Hunx?” what do you say?
HUNX Depends on my mood. I can usually tell when someone’s gonna ask me. It’s always a cool, weird person, it’s never a normal-looking person. If I see a punky or weird young person looking at me extra, it’s pretty easy to clock.
48 HILLS Your voice has changed a lot, and so has your role as a vocalist. Tell me a little about how things are different for you on Walk Out On This World than on previous records.
HUNX When we started, my friend [Justin Champlin, aka Nobunny] had written these songs that he wanted high school girls to sing. He wanted to form a Donnas type of band, and then that didn’t happen, so he was like, “Do you want these songs?” Being gay, I also love female vocalists. I felt like I tried to sound like a girl or a chipmunk for the band. I always felt like I’m not really a singer, and then after our band stopped for a while, I made two solo records, and I was like, “I don’t need to sing so high anymore, I can sing low.” I feel like it just made me a better singer in general.
Then when we came back together to do this record, Shannon had worked so much with Shannon and the Clams that she was a way better musician. I think it’s just growth and doing it and getting better and having more of an idea of how I wanted to sound. Also, we spent a really long time making this record compared to before where it would be one or two takes.
48 HILLS Does the extra time owe to your personal struggles or was it a creative choice?
HUNX Well, it started off extremely slow in the first place because Shannon lived in Portland and Erin and I lived in LA. I didn’t know if it was really gonna happen to be honest because Shannon was about to get married and then her fiancé died, and she ended up moving down here and we didn’t even work on the record for a while because she was grieving too hard.
It was delayed because of that for a long time, but in the same way it’s the only reason the record actually got made. It took longer, but it happened because we were all together and bonded by this tragedy. We finished the record before the fire, but we were supposed to release it a lot sooner and make all these videos, and I was just like, “I can’t do it.” Even doing it now was really, really hard. I didn’t want to do it at all, but thank God the shows have been so fun.
48 HILLS Have the shows helped you rekindle that spark, or do you feel like you just need a break?
HUNX I’ve been writing another solo record for the past few years, so definitely excited to do that. I’ve just been really excited to perform again. At the beginning I was like, “I can’t do this, why am I doing this?” Now I’m like, “When’s the next show?”
HUNX AND HIS PUNX Thu/25, 7pm, The Chapel, SF. More info here.
