This is a takeaway that comes up over and over in conversation. Sometimes it means wholesome adult-rock-star bonding—like the period when the band all lived together while recording at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio, eating home-cooked meals prepared by White—and sometimes it’s more emotional. Sweeney tells a story about the writing of “Rio’s Song,” dedicated to his lifelong friend Rio Hackford, who died in 2022. Speaking about this process on the porch of his mom’s house now, the ocean audible just beyond him, he still gets choked up remembering how his friends comforted him in the studio. I ask if making the record felt therapeutic for him: “Fuck yes,” he responds instantly. “Isn’t that actually why we like bands?”
The Hard Quartet often plays like a tribute to the deep bonds we form with music. The lyrics are filled with references to classic artists—from Motorhead to Blue Öyster Cult, Big Star to Sister Sledge—and the cozy sprawl of the record gives the sense of a party that none of the attendees want to leave. Working together at this stage in their careers also adds a sense of urgency that Sweeney says felt palpable during the sessions. “I like how music fucks with time,” he explains. “You can lose yourself in it. In every fucking aspect of conscious experience, I am trying to treat time as musically as possible. And it’s a funny thing when you’re with these guys you care about a lot—you want to make the most of it.”
While Malkmus’s lyrics often take a more absurdist bent, even he was surprised by some of the personal history that arose from the writing process. In “Six Deaf Rats,” a nearly seven-minute epic that stands as the Hard Quartet’s single greatest performance to date, he shifts his perspective near the end for a verse sung in the voice of an aging, former college bully:
Hazing the frat boys
That was a joke to me
I just laughed as I poked them in the ass
With my Kappa Sig brand
And they knew what it was like
To be my little bitches, they were
While it might read on the page like typical Malkmus free-association, in the song itself—over White’s dazzling rhythm and an arrangement that multiple members refer to using the word emo—the delivery can’t help but feel strangely tender.
I ask Malkmus over the phone if he can help elaborate on what was going through his mind as he delivered these lines. For one thing, he tells me, he and his daughter had just watched Bama Rush, a documentary about sororities. Next, he thinks back to his own experiences at the University of Virginia, where he recalls classmates being brutally hazed (“You know, having to eat dog food with cum…stuff like that”).
Then, he gets relatively wistful as he tells a story about his grandfather, a water polo star at the University of Illinois in the 1920s. “I’ve seen pictures of him with his barrel chest,” he recalls. Going through his family’s possessions some time ago, he discovered a frat boy paddle with notches carved on the back. He wondered what purpose those must have served, a century back. “It just made me think that maybe he had been amassing”—a thoughtful pause—“swats on these dudes’ asses. Does that make sense?”
