By Grace Robins-Somerville
Copyright pitchfork
As far as indie rock origin stories go, “mailman moonlighting as a rock star gets word-of-mouth breakthrough, no label needed” is about as cool as it gets. Mike Maple started driving for USPS in 2020, shortly before his band Liquid Mike released its first two albums. Since then, the prolific group has put out a record a year of high-octane garage rock, drawing in a cult fanbase: Its 2023 album S/T struck a nerve on Bandcamp and Twitter, despite having almost no formal promotion; then, 2024’s Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot earned the group critical buzz and support slots with bands like Descendants, Joyce Manor, and Militarie Gun.
Like other Midwest rockers before them—The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and Guided By Voices all come to mind—Liquid Mike like their runtimes short, their guitars loud, and their hooks easy to sing along to no matter how many beers you’ve had. The band’s first five albums were mostly inspired by Maple’s time driving the mail truck around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the small-town shenanigans he and his friends got up to off the clock. Their discography is filled with “get out of this town” anthems—but on their sixth album, Hell Is an Airport, Liquid Mike asks what happens when a hometown hero’s journey takes him outside of his familiar surroundings.
A lot of what happens, it turns out, is more of the same. Most of these songs see Maple in head-on collision with the realization that the ennui of his home life won’t disappear once he hits the road. “What are you running from?/A middle-aged Houdini/Locked ice box/Works hard to take it easy,” Maple sings on “Grand Am,” pondering the hours he spent at previous dead-end jobs—now that his dream job has become his day job, was the less predictable path worth it? “AT&T” features some subtle record scratching underneath its shimmery guitar progression, as Maple drags out the line, “How the days move slow” in a way that could apply both to the hurry-up-and-wait of his life as a touring musician, or the grind that preceded it when this kind of success was just a daydream.
Maple’s fears of becoming an “out-of-touch out-of-towner” bubble to the surface of the speedy and metallic “Double Dutch,” though oftentimes Hell Is an Airport sees Maple and his band leaving town only to discover that the rest of the country embodies the same monotony they’ve been trying to escape. Abandoned malls, endless highways, and dead-eyed service workers are reminders of alienation on all fronts. Hell Is an Airport soundtracks industrial wastelands and suburban sprawl with wiry power-pop, crunched-up grunge-gaze, and even the occasional coughing fit of stoner metal.
