Prince Daddy & the Hyena – Hotwire Trip Switch | Album Review
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Counter Intuitive Records
Is there anything more dreadful than waking up in the aftermath of a party you threw? Bottles everywhere, trash can overflowing, the social hum of your friends long gone. All that’s left is exhausted air and a pile of miscellaneous stuff that friends and acquaintances will have to stop by to pick up at some point. You’re probably hungover, your mouth is dry, and the last thing you want to do is trudge out to your living room to see what carnage awaits you. Then the panic sets in: Was the party fun? Why did that guy leave early? Do my friends hate me? But then you check your phone and look back at some IG Stories. Maybe it wasn’t all so bad… Well, except the puke in your kitchen sink.
Prince Daddy & the Hyena are back with Hotwire Trip Switch. This album has been framed as a collection of singles, all mapping out years of feeling good and feeling bad in the raucous way only this band can capture. These rockers are rapidly approaching the tenth anniversary of their debut album, I Thought You Didn’t Even Like Leaving, and a decade later, maybe they're not forgetting to take their meds anymore, but they still seem to find themselves asking what’s the point.
It's been a while since Prince Daddy & the Hyena last released an album — their 2022 self-titled album on Pure Noise Records — quite a gap for the notorious road dogs. It’s not that they disappeared or anything. During this gap between albums, they embarked on multiple tours and contributed to several projects, like their double release God Complex / La Da Da, their cover of “You Get What You Give” on Pure Noise’s Dead Formats series, their cover of Foxing’s “Rory,” and their 2025 one-off “Mr. Transistor” to mark their return to Counter Intuitive Records. But it’s been a hot minute since we heard a full-length project from Albany’s rowdiest, so I think it’s fair to do a bit of a retrospective here.
I was first introduced to Kory Gregory’s iconic voice with his apology on a 2017 split with Mom Jeans and Pictures of Vernon called Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 420, specifically on a duet called “Thrashville 2/3” with Kississippi. His scratchy yelp melded with Kississippi’s croon as they yelled “Sorry in advance, I’m sorta bad at this,” before devolving into a song about feeling like a piece of shit and smoking too much weed. That’s a good example of a lot of Prince Daddy & the Hyena’s early songs: but there’s nuance to feeling like shit, and over multiple albums and EPs, they grappled with every angle of it — the hilarity, the misery, the apologies.
From there, they took an intergalactic dive with Cosmic Thrill Seekers, a 2019 concept album crafted in the aftermath of a devastating acid trip. Their songs, once short and acerbic (as on their 2015 EP Adult Summers), suddenly enveloped listeners with longer studies on feelings of being trapped and frustrated. The band seemed to long for the friction they struggled against for years. Their barbs were no longer pointed outwards, but inwards too. They continued this thread into their 2022 self-titled LP, by far their most desperate and darkest work yet, but also their sunniest. That description is not meant to be taken literally, even though the opener is a harmonious song called “Adore the Sun.” Prince Daddy bounced between these two feelings throughout the album: believing in some kind of tangible hope after a horrific van accident while also coating their lyrics in an infestation of bugs, rats, and mold. This brings us to Hotwire Trip Switch, kind of an album, kind of a collection of songs, but definitely not like anything else they’ve released yet.
The album starts with a kick drum on “24-03-04_Birthday_B4,” immediately charting us on a synth-y sail, full speed ahead. They pick up even more velocity with the following song, “Big-Box Store Heart,” which has been stuck in my head since the second I heard it. Initially, this was a surprise. Prince Daddy’s last full release was moody, even grim at times, so to return with a refreshed, bouncing, pop-punk single was unexpected. But this is Prince Daddy & the Hyena, and by now I should have learned to expect the unexpected. One thing you can count on, however, is a hit, and "Big-Box Store Heart" is a crowd-pleaser just begging to be danced to, and by God, it will be.
Daniel Gorham’s drums surge through the band on “NQA,” but the heartbeat of the Hotwire Trip Switch thumps in “Crash Taylor,” somewhere in the center of the project, but more like the close of the first half. This is a quote-unquote “singles record,” and I definitely get what Prince Daddy means by that; it’s about the individual stories within songs themselves rather than the larger landscapes they create, but there is still a clear throughline connecting these songs. There are insurmountable feelings of frustration, constraint, and the glimpses of joy you get despite that. When Kory jokingly sings, “what goes up / must come down / and boy it comes down whenever I’m underneath,” it is clear that this sentiment is the crux of the album and maybe even Prince Daddy's discography as a whole.
Hotwire Trip Switch picks back up with “30days30days30days,” a blistering plea for help cutting through the most materialistic aspects of society. Over a Scooby Doo chase scene-esque melody, Gregory mutters to himself about trying to medicate with alcohol and pills before picturing a sedentary, unactualized dream of isolation. The song revs into overdrive, Kory’s voice becoming supersonic as he lists a kind of unattainable cottagecore fantasy: “move to the mountains / cancel the subscriptions / maybe start a juice cleanse.” While Kory states that this is done to “repair what’s malfunctioning,” it's clear, even as he says it, that this isn't happening. It almost seems to mock punk songs, encouraging the opposite: instead of learning guitar, getting in the van, and playing shows, Gregory humors himself with the suggestion that maybe the cure for all his problems is escape.
The debaucherous pleas riddled through “30days30days30days” leads into “SHITSHOW or Boulevard of Soaking Dreams,” which is also probably the best song title on the album — it’s between that and “Sure Could (A Random Exercise In Life-Altering Party Fouls).” Prince Daddy & the Hyena has always been funny, not haha funny, more like funny because if I don’t make a joke out of [whatever thing] I’ll cry. While they may have changed several aspects of their sound — Joe Reinhart, producer of artists like Hop Along and Joyce Manor, cleared up Cameron Handford’s guitar tones, focused on Kory’s more reserved vocals, and cranked Jordan Chmielowski’s bass to eleven — they have never lost their humor. This is a revelation I made after Gregory closes the song with “The water's running out / I don't know why it turns me on / But it turns me on.”
If “Crash Taylor” was the heart of Hotwire Trip Switch, then the penultimate track “Something’s Gotta Give” is the brain. Unexpectedly chuggy compared to the pop-punk fury Prince Daddy deliver throughout the rest of the album. It’s not quite a self-titled B-side; “Something’s Gotta Give” is introspective and earthy like that record, sure, but it’s a fresh wound. Rather, it’s a wound that keeps getting reinfected. The song seems to come from a place of internalized doubt; it’s been over ten years of Prince Daddy, and what do they have to show for it? Gregory takes a morose, lamenting tone at the end, singing “five albums of this / everyone is concerned / something’s gotta give/ you’re scaring off the kids / they’ll probably turn it off before the end.”
Over a decade of music can’t end there, so distraught, so regretful. So, ever the mighty party band they are, Prince Daddy & the Hyena rally one last time to close the album out with “Pinch Me.” While the lyrical content doesn't change significantly (things suck, you don’t think you deserve all this, and you plead that one day you’ll feel like you do), the song is ultimately jovial. Prince Daddy messes around with chiptune in a cartoon-like vortex of sound; their songs always seem to sound on the verge of collapse, and here they finally do collapse. It’s the perfect place for the party to end. That moment when you crash into your bed in the early hours of the morning, only to wake up when the sun peeks through the blinds or the neighbor starts vacuuming.
Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.
