Photo credit: Nicole Zenoni
Direct Hit
Punk tends to reward purity of vision. Generally the surest path to success for a punk band is to do one thing and do it well, be it streamlined garage punk, street punk or post-hardcore. Direct Hit have never been ones to limit themselves, though. The Milwaukee quartet is most often described as pop-punk because of their distinctive embrace of the more radio-friendly punk of the early ’00s, but they’ve never restricted their records to those sounds. Instead, their albums hopscotch from skate-punk to hardcore and alternative. It’s all punk, sure, but it’s a very wide tent.
“The band started being very influenced by standard four-chord rock bands like The Thermals, The Ramones, Andrew W.K. and Blink-182, because that was just the kind of band I wanted to start, but it was never the only music we were interested in,” explains singer/guitarist Nick Woods. “I never wanted to just play one kind of sound over and over again. And, since Direct Hit is the only band that I have, that means that we have a song that’s under a minute long and I’m screaming the whole time, Direct Hit has to play it. And it also means that if I have a song that’s a four-minute prom hit from the ’80s, then Direct Hit is playing that, too.”
“That’s why there are so many different sounds on our records,” he continues. “They don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Direct Hit didn’t hide their ambition on their 2016’s Wasted Minds, their first for Fat Wreck Chords, a sprawling, wide-screen punk record. And their follow-up Crown of Nothing, released last month, is an even bolder swing for the fences as well as a step outside of their comfort zone. In the past, their process had always been to rehearse the songs to near completion before they began recording, but for the new album they left room for surprises in the studio, while inviting more than a dozen guest musicians to leave their mark on the record.
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“It gave us a chance to bring is some different ideas,” Woods says. “But it was very uncomfortable at times. Usually when we enter the studio we can always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I think this was the first album where we didn’t. We walked into this tunnel and didn’t see the other side of it, so we had to trust each other and the musicians we brought in to help bring us to the other side.”
To these ears, Crown of Nothing is Direct Hit’s most exciting record, and the unpredictability flatters the band. The anthemic opener “Different Universe” kicks off the album with lighters-waving pomp. The raging “Perfect Black” is fitfully ferocious, while keyboards and saxophones give “Bad Answer” the sweep of a heyday Bruce Springsteen track.
But Woods speaks about the album with a mix of pride and ambivalence. “I think it’s clearly our most interesting album,” he says (which, you’ll note, is not the same as “our best album”). And while Woods insists “I’m really happy with how it turned out,” he also talks about it as if it’s still a work in progress.
“It’s hard when you’re so ADD about music and you like everything,” he says. “That’s a challenge for a band like us, trying to figure out how to do everything you like without letting your vision get lost along the way. I think we’re still struggling with that on this record. It’s a little mixtapey, I feel, even though that doesn’t bother me at all.”
Woods credits their label Fat Wreck Chords for giving the band the freedom—not to mention the budget—to make the kind of albums they want to make, even though that their scattershot nature makes them anything but a surefire return on investment.
“They’ve never questioned a decision we’ve made,” Woods says of the label. “They knew we weren’t going to be a band that sold a ton of records. They knew we toured a lot. They knew we had families. They knew we had other stuff in our lives separate from this group, and that’s why we’re so loyal to that label. They’ve been very understanding of everything we’ve wanted to do.”
