Filling The Void With HAN MEE And JIM SHAW From HOT MILK

Interview by Kris Peters
By sheer virtue of the fact they were hand-picked by Foo Fighters for the Australian support slot, Hot Milk just HAVE to be a good band.
But it's not until you sit back and listen to the band that it becomes evident that they are actually shit hot and if the Fooeys hadn't chosen them as support then they probably wouldn't have been doing their job right.
Comprised of co-front people Han Mee and Jim Shaw who grew up together in Manchester, Hot Milk have captured people's attention on a global scale, amassing 50 million global streams across 3 x EPs and playing the likes of Reading + Leeds, Download, Lollapalooza, Rock Am Ring and more.
Just looking through their brief, but busy career trajectory tells the true story of success, with Hot Milk deliberately restricting themselves to three EPs initially as a way of discovering their sound and musical identity and allowing time to fully flesh out their vision, rather than rushing to put out a full album.
That planning and patience was realised earlier this year with the release of their debut album A Call To The Void, which has elevated Hot Milk even further into the sonic stratosphere.
Thus, their current Australian run of shows, not just supporting Foo Fighters, but also containing two headlining shows in Melbourne and Sydney.
HEAVY caught up with Han and Jim not long before their second headlining show, which is tonight in Sydney.
"It was great," Han enthused when asked how the first show of the tour went. "But we're changing the set because we got angry at ourselves. It's one of them, it's like, when you're playing with the Foos you just have to do your best and have fun doing it. You've gotta absorb those moments. It's the stuff dreams are made of, really."
We press Han on what she means by saying they got upset at themselves.
"We're perfectionists, and we didn't play the best set we could play," Jim chimed in.
"We basically came off the back of our own headlining tour," Han continued, "and didn't have time to think about what we were gonna do for the Foo Fighters. We kind of did a stripped-back version of that, and then we realised we need to do something specific for this crowd and specific for the Foos."
In the full interview, Han and Jim talk about the magnitude of sharing a stage with Foo Fighters, having to shut that out and focus on the task at hand, playing their own headlining shows, the emotional difference between playing to tens of thousands with FF one night and then playing to a more intimate pub crowd the night after, what to expect from their shows, their debut album and how it was received, how they planned the album over three EPs and more.


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