Texas emo-crew Hew tries to define the divine on Your Version.
I meant to get this review published a few days before the release date for Hew‘s latest foray into existential angst Your Version, but I kept getting distracted by watching The Summer I Turned Pretty and revisiting the ’00s glory of Smallville. Both are shows that revel in the deep emotional turmoil that rages untamed within the hearts of young people, but unlike the guys in Hew, the characters in these shows are not suffering from a lack of attention. That’s not to say Hew isn’t attention-worthy; it is to say that Conrad and Jeremiah and Clark and Lana were most likely not the crowd Hew was hanging out with in high school. And, in some ways, that’s at the heart of emo: it’s a striving for some undefined thing we can’t ever quite grasp. It’s not that we all had a secret desire to be popular; it’s that there’s something popular people had that we didn’t.
The brilliance of Your Version is that it seems to exist in both of these worlds. Lyrically, the band touches on lost love, abuse, mental illness, and anxiety in way that puts them firmly in the realm of emo; musically, the band is varied enough that they seem to be able to cross from one cafeteria table to another in an admirably effortlessly way. On opener “Needle Eye”, guitarist and singer Lindsay Minton sings ‘How do I find the divine? Am I running out of time?‘. It sets the tone for the next forty minutes, an exploration of what it means to keep striving for the undefined, reaching out to make sense of this world.
It’s a tall task, but one that’s consistently revisited in the drama of our stories. Whether it’s Conrad and Jeremiah trying to bring emotional meaning to their lives through their relationship with the poor hot mess of Belly, or Clark Kent making sure he doesn’t use his x-ray vision for more nefarious purposes, the stories we tell are always about trying to find the divine in the world around us. Your Version does this in a multi-layered, varied way. While all the songs exist in this mid-tempo guitar-bass-drums realm, relying heavily on a loud-soft dynamic, there’s enough variation that it makes it feel like each song is another attempt at reaching that emotional peak of acceptance.
On “Frozen Scarecrow”, one of the album’s highlights, the band asks if it gets any better, and if so, who the hell is hiding the evidence. The song is a straight-up rocker, flinging from verse to chorus that makes it feel immediately accessible and ready for prime time. The interplay between Minton’s guitar work and Mercy Harper’s six-stringed bass creates a warm sonic backdrop for the angst that comes through lyrically. And while those two, most assuredly, were not hanging out with the Lana Langs of high school, the music has a versatility that wouldn’t be out of place over the subdued pastels of the Smallville countryside.
And that’s either the biggest strength of Your Version or its creative Achilles heel. Hew are at their most earnest when the band locks in with Minton lyrically – they shift from the meandering Modest Mouse curiosity of the Northwest to the angular muscularity of Jawbox from the mid-Atlantic in way that all seems quintessentially Texan and effortlessly now. The songs feel just as much home on the range, as they do in the ragged, muggy streets of Houston. This is in no fault to the years Minton and Harper spent playing in small, sweaty bars as football, etc.. There’s a confidence in the playing and the craftsmanship of the songs that makes you buy whatever it is they’re selling.
“EMDR”, for instance, is a little song that comes towards the back half of the album. Dirge-like in comparison to some of the other songs on the album, the song laments a father who was absent in more ways than one. ‘Won’t have to leave him,’ cries Minton, ‘he’s gonna leave us anyway.‘ If there’s hopelessness explicit in the lyrics, there is hope implicit in the sonic construction in which these words find themselves embedded. This continues, musically, on the expansive “Are You Breathing”, one of the album’s finest examples of Minton and Harper’s ability to play off of each other in ways that reflects a deep history and one that seems to be really finding it’s footing in the slippery time of 2026.
I also found a bit of solace in watching re-runs of Beverly Hills 90210, perhaps the anti-emo show of the ’90s. My wife said she used to hate-watch it with her drama friends when she was in high school in the nineties. I get it: we were all a little too cool to be sucked into the pastels and predictable lives of Dylan and Brandon back then, but we still watched it. Because we all have our own versions of emo, be it the kids in the convertible Corvettes or the ones on the back of the yellow bus, slunked down in the chair listening to a Rites of Spring tape. As they say in their last song “Criss Cross”, our love is angular in a perfect way. To each their own, indeed. (Team Conrad, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.)
