Hot Cops

Local powerpop heroes Hot Cops are celebrating the release of their newest self-released EP, Everyone’s an Animal, with a killer bill including New Ruins, Chemicals and Scurvine this Saturday, July 11 at Cowboy Monkey. buzz’s Mark Sieckman took a few minutes to chat with Hot Cops frontman Nik Allen to talk powerpop, the CU scene and the inevitable Michael Jackson.

buzz:Hot Cops has been around the CU scene in various incarnations for about three years. How do you think you have changed or matured over that time?

Nik Allen:I think we all came out of different backgrounds musically with mixtures of powerpop, shoegaze and Midwestern post-rock. We’re a pastiche of different genres. We had been playing in different groups like Green Light Go for a while now, and we molded ourselves into a combination of the elements of different bands—a little shoegaze and a little indie rock.

buzz: What can the audience expect from your new EP, Everyone’s an Animal?

Nik Allen:The EP is fairly similar to what we do live. The live show has more energy that we aspire to put in the recording, but the recording captures our spirits and our intensity of sound more so than what the sound guy does any given night. The EP is more of a vision of what we aim to sound like—a lot noisier and a lot louder.

buzz: What can the audience expect from the show at Cowboy Monkey this Saturday?

Nik Allen: The audience can expect a very warm vibe and the sense of community that we see in Urbana. It’s not a competition with bands vying for supremacy. It’s going to be lovey-dovey between us and New Ruins and Chemicals and Scurvine. They’re all great bands, and we really get along. It will be the ideal of what this scene is.

buzz:You have very powerpop sensibilities about your music. Where do you think music and pop music in general are headed these days?

Nik Allen:We have too much of a love for noise to be totally into pop music. I don’t think we have any clue where we fit into it pop though. The music we like—indie, post-rock, Midwest—is all coming out of its shell right now. Indie pop is incredibly big, and the more quirky genres are rearing their heads in the underground. The bands we take influence from are steadily becoming a kind of monumental force like the next big wave.

buzz:What kind of non-musical elements are you inspired by?

Nik Allen:I think each of us have various influences. Lyrically, a lot of my influences are Rainer Maria Rilke and Gabriel García Márquez. As a band, Prime Time Pizza is a gigantic influence of ours. And I think the Midwest and the people of Urbana definitely have a huge influence.

buzz:You have also cited Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” before. How do you think that fits in to what Hot Cops is doing?

Nik Allen:There is some amount of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and definitely My Bloody Valentine. Shoegaze in general is about creating that beautiful noisy wash. Phil Spector might be at the heart, but shoegaze is at the forefront.

buzz: Questions about Michael Jackson are kind of unavoidable these days, so how did Hot Cops react to Michael Jackson’s passing? Do you guys have any favorite tunes?

Nik Allen: We all love Michael Jackson. As a whole, we’re still dumbfounded. We haven’t figured out a press release to put out to state just how we feel, but we’re still mourning as a whole. I think we’re just as tore up about Billy Mays, so we don’t know how to react.

buzz: Finally, there have been various reports about the name Hot Cops. Do you care to comment on where the name comes from?

Nik Allen: The reason we are Hot Cops is because when we first played together, we wanted to be called The Police, but we heard another band already took that name. Hot Cops was the next best thing, and that is our official statement about it. Whether or not it is a reference to Arrested Development we will leave to the people for their own assumptions.

Find out for yourselves all about CU’s finest Hot Cops with New Ruins, Chemicals and Scurvine this Saturday at Cowboy Monkey. Their latest release, Everyone’s an Animal, was recorded in the same studio that New Ruins created We Make Our Own Bad Luck, so the EP—and their live performance—will surely carry the same monumental weight.