It wasn’t long before Marnik left, guitarist Dante DeCaro joined, and Bays took over vocals. In 1998, the duo met drummer Paul Hawley, and later the group’s friend Matthew Marnik came on board as vocalist. Hot Hot Heat comprised drugstore clerk Dustin Hawthorne and personal assistant-turned-singer Steve Bays, who’d been playing together since 1995. And yet Make Up The Breakdown is vital to any discussion of aughts dance–punk. Unlike other ’00s dance-punk acts, such as LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Arctic Monkeys, Hot Hot Heat’s career cooled wayyyy down after the initial flush of the album we’re all here to discuss, 2002’s Make Up The Breakdown, which turns 20 on Saturday. The entire vibe was very “wasted and sweaty at an indie dance club,” and bands like Hot Hot Heat were part of what made that happen. ’00s bands under the energetic, club-ready dance-punk umbrella eventually evolved into what we now call indie-sleaze, a ruling metropolitan aesthetic that lasted roughly from 2006-2012 where early 20-something millennials danced to whatever Misshapes were spinning, read Nylon and Hipster Runoff, listened to M.I.A., drank PBR and/or Four Loko, and dressed exclusively in metallic lamé pants from American Apparel. Hot Hot Heat and their contemporaries made use of the garage-band revival, but they mashed in pop-punk, electronic, and post-punk that was largely inspired by ’70s and ’80s acts like the B-52’s, Sparks, Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, Public Image Ltd., New Order, the Clash, and Gang Of Four. It also opened up a lane for the more dance-punk-oriented Hot Hot Heat to exist. You could absolutely argue that Hot Hot Heat’s mainstream success was catalyzed by the Strokes, whose popularity and nostalgia-driven aesthetic birthed legions of “the” bands (the Hives, the Vines, the Von Bondies, the White Stripes, the Killers). As journalist Lizzy Goodman outlined in her 2017 scene opus Meet Me In The Bathroom, “almost every artist I interviewed for this book – from all over the world – said it was the Strokes that opened the door for them.” One of those bands hailed from British Columbia and had an eye-twitchingly meta name: Hot Hot Heat. As the Strokes and their downtown-cool, Velvet Underground-revivalist shtick surged in popularity – largely a pendulum swing away from TRL boy bands, rap-rock, post-post–post grunge (and all other strains of Butt Rock) - a wave of like-minded guitar acts followed, from New York or not. It’s funny to think now, two decades later, what the early Aughts Return To Rock(™) era hath wrought.
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