Sometimes there’s a band. Well, they’re the band for their time and place. They fit right in there. And that’s IfIHadAHiFi, in Milwaukee. On their latest EP, Paws In The Bacon Grease, the veteran Midwest noise-rockers soundtrack a world in perpetual collapse. There’s death, disease, misinformation, student loans, and toxic kittens. “Kitty paws are cute,” the band says in the liner notes, “but they can also give you Toxoplasmosis. This EP is sort of about Toxoplasmosis.”
It wasn’t always this way. When IfIHadAHiFi first clamored on the scene in 2000, the group was content to play the part of mischievous noise-makers banging out songs about space, technology, and dorky dance parties. (Who else but IfIHadAHiFi would release an EP titled Nada Surf after alt-rock band Nada Surf released a covers album called If I Had a Hi-Fi?) But around the time a certain Wisconsin governor took office in 2011, the band began radiating a more political and irritable vibe. (See that year’s “Imperial Walker.”) Things were getting shitty. IfIHadAHiFi was getting pissed.
And now, in the miserable and maddening year of our lord 2025, IfIHadAHiFi is super pissed. Paws In The Bacon Grease opener “Welfare Jets” is a clanging and apocalyptic scream into the war machine void. “Everyone’s A Doctor” is a demented Devo-esque ditty “where the points don’t matter and nobody wins.” The alternately pummeling and herky-jerky “Crash Commander” is all screams and static, and closer “Welcome To The Pale Blue Dot” twists Carl Sagan’s famous meditation on our precious planet into a dire warning. “Welcome to the pale blue dot,” drummer/vocalist DrAwkward yelps on the latter song. “We eat our young down here / So if you’re calling just hang up.”
Shitty times call for extraordinary measures, and here, too, IfIHadAHiFi find themselves the band for their time and place. The forever palindrome-happy group—Yale Delay, MrAlarm, Rev.Ever, and DrAwkward—will follow Paws In The Bacon Grease with another EP, Night Vision Creeps, in November.
“The songs represent two different batches of songs written in two different spurts after COVID,” DrAwkward, a.k.a. DJ Hostettler says. “The first EP’s songs came out sounding more guitar-based and ‘punk’ to our ears, whereas the second batch incorporates a moodier, synth-heavy tone, with slightly more depressing lyrical themes. Of course, once we started listening to the final mixes together, we realized that they probably could flow together as one cohesive piece, but by then we had already finalized art and titles for both EPs, so, ya know…the hell with it. Maximize the press cycles, you know? Two EPs clearly means twice as many blog posts!”
Provided the world is still standing in November, look for that second blog post then.
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