It's Time To Get Feral In The Grass: Super Hit Talks New Album Menacing Earthworks
- Josh Kitchen
- Oct 29, 2025
- 10 min read
Updated: Nov 16, 2025
By: Josh Kitchen / October 28, 2025
“It’s time to get feral in the grass / time to make love to the world. But something isn’t right. What is it? I don’t know.”
These lyrics from the opening track of Menacing Earthworks, Super Hit’s first album in three years, ask the listener to stop and think about the mess we’re in. What is there to do when your entire world is constantly being crushed by sadomasochistic imperialist fascist overlords hell-bent on putting the planet through a monolithic white nationalist washing machine?
Hayden Waggener, the brains behind the electronic, ambient, psychedelic outfit Super Hit, asks if it’s time to just let loose and try to feel something. Whether that’s through dance, introspection, meditation, or going absolutely feral, there are many doors to choose from on Menacing Earthworks.
The album feels like the record all of Waggener’s output has been leading up to over the past decade — from electronic soundscape experiments on his early works to psychedelic pieces inspired by the ’60s and ’70s — culminating in his most fully realized statement yet. It’s a record with a structured beginning, middle, and end, anchored by the album’s centerpiece: the epic, Santana-esque track “Plinth Parade.”
The world might be burning, but on Menacing Earthworks, listeners get a bit of a respite — with the added bonus of hearing something that might make them feel less alone. I caught up with Waggener to talk about the culmination of ten years of Super Hit, the inspirations behind the record, honing your craft, and finding the art in the mundanity of our mechanical world.
The new record is really good. What I love about your work is how you take these ambient, electronic, and psychedelic inspirations and make them your own — an inner space with really cool songwriting. And I feel like on this new record, it’s kind of like everything’s been leading up to this. That’s how I would describe it, because it feels like you’re using your voice as such a major instrument and really letting all of those sounds percolate into this epic record. Talk to me about that.
I agree. This project has been almost a 10-year-long endeavor, and I feel that this album is the one I’m most proud of. I think a lot of that is because we’ve slowly involved more and more incredible creative people, and it really feels now like a group effort.
And I think people who love your music think all of your music is good, but like any artist, you put the work in over the years as you learn and hone your craft. So when you get to an album like this, it’s even more exciting because you can hear it. Even the album cover — I love it. It reminds me of Ghostbusters — not in a bad way, but in the best way. There’s something maybe not sinister but mysterious, like something waiting to be unleashed in that electric paneling.
Yeah, I had that idea a long time ago — or I guess about a year ago. I have a sort of rule about the album art for Super Hit as a project: I like when it’s a single photograph of a real-world occurrence, with as little editing or manipulation as possible. I’ve always been obsessed with fuse boxes and power stations and just boxes with doors where you don’t really know what’s behind them. It’s part of the way the world works that we don’t pay attention to, and I’ve always felt like utilitarian design — even signage or warning labels — can be really inspiring.
A caution sign on an electrical box is like a piece of art. It’s made with intention, with a humanist approach. So that electrical panel on the cover — I found it through a surplus website. I scrolled through probably like 50 pages of just the keyword “electrical panel door.” It took me so long, and when I finally found that one, it felt like a ready-made artwork before I did anything to it.
It’s one of those things that feels like you’ve seen it before while crate-digging through records. It has a classic feel.
I’m glad to hear that. Once I modified the panel and added some of the decoration, we stuck it to a wall and photographed it among other electrical panels. We shot a couple of rolls of film, and the one photo that ended up being the cover had this quality none of the others did. Maybe it was slightly over- or underexposed, but it created this real mystery. Even when I pull out the sheet of negatives, you can immediately tell which one it is. There’s something really special about that image — light and smoke emanating from a door you can’t quite see.
It’s theatrical - almost science fiction. But like you said, it’s things you see in real life — walking through a big city, where you don’t know what’s around the next corner but you know what’s supposed to be there. I’m glad you brought up that feeling of finding art out in the world because it made me think of what I think is the centerpiece of the record — “Plinth Parade.”
That one definitely feels like the centerpiece of the record to me and also like a very personal song. The phrase “plinth parade” conjures a row of columns marching, as if they’re legs. “Welcome to the plinth parade, Danny” is almost like saying, “That’s life. Get used to it.” There’s very little context for our existence — we’re born into this world, and we all feel like we know some stuff about the universe and reality, but we really know very little. A lot of voices in the world sort of tell you how things are and how things are going to be. When you're a kid that can be a very strange feeling. Like theres this weird program I have to get with in order to exist in this world. Thats the sort of the inspiration for that song. This album really ties back to memories and dreams and childhood emotions.
There's a lot of childlike imagery and sounds almost like lullabies. I love the last track of the album, Ballerinana. It reminds me of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue. Theres these really slow, melancholic and mournful feelings - its such a great closer to the album.
Thank you. Yeah. It's kind of a streak now. I like ending the albums with a soft, sort of lullaby-esque thing. That one is also one of my favorites. We recorded that at a studio in Glendale, just the bare bones, basic tracks, and just the brushes on the drums. I think we maybe did two or three takes of it, and it feels like the most live and intimate piece on the record. I mean, so many of the songs have probably more than like 60 to 70 individual elements coming in and out, which is probably a result of me spending much longer than I need to on finishing these ideas. So certainly some of it is very kitchen sink. But it was nice to try to restrain myself. You want to add more and more, and sometimes you don't need to.
The record feels very contained - it has a beginning, middle, and an end.
I'm very considerate of people's time. To me it's the balances. They set the precedent that it's very efficient, so then when moments happen in the record that like go slower than you would think they may go, hopefully, it provokes some sort of moment of contemplation.
Like in the in the record, there's a few moments - and we've done this on the previous record as well. But my friend Jude Tedaldi, who plays cello, we've devised this sort of system where oftentimes I'll have some sort of synthesizer pad playing the note or chord that the song is in, and we'll sit down with the cello and he'll play on top of that initial bed. And oftentimes he's playing these harmonics on the cello that are super squeaky and weird, just hitting these really interesting guttural sounds. And so we'll, we'll layer up, 456, of those, you know, just improvised takes on top of whatever the source material is. And when you then take out the synthesizers or whatever the source material is, what you're left with is this, like swarm of these incredible sounds. And because of the way that string instruments work, and many all instruments really like there's a harmonic series, and when you're playing the harmonics on a cello, there's a there's certain notes that you know you're gonna hear. So all these different parts are playing together, but they're improvising. So you get these, like, accidental confluences.
On "Plinth Parade," there's a portion in the middle of that song that is kind of using that technique, and then at the end of the song, "Storytime" as well. I left, I think, a minute or two of that sort of bed. I feel like I use tension and release so much, and you know, it's all very slow builds to get to those moments of catharsis. That song, especially, I felt like we needed to sit for a little while with for a little digestion period, before we move on.
And talking about how this is a very nostalgic and personal record for me, the initial demo or spark of an idea for that song was a guitar riff that I had written in Vermont even before the first Super Hit album. If something doesn't get finished and it's in the batch of songs for an album, very rarely do I return back to it. It would end up on the album if it was exciting enough to me in that moment - but every once in a while, I'll listen back to something, and I'm like, this has some real potential.
I'm proud of "Storytime" for that reason. And to me, it was the first song I felt like that was sort of like a commentary on something. I don't know if you've noticed, but in the past decade, there's this sort of language around, like, "tell your story. " and it's become like this commodifiable thing.
Prepackaged - ready to go.
Exactly. If you’re an artist trying to reach an audience, people want a packaged identity: “Here’s who I am. Here’s my story.” I like the idea of questioning that. Maybe “Story Time” means it’s time to go to bed.
I love so many of the lyrics on this record, there are so many great declarative statement sounding ideas like “It’s time to get feral in the grass," and “this place is a message.”
Yeah. That track, to me, is the image of the album cover. It's not a concept album, but the term “menacing earthworks” was an actual government-funded project — one of many ideas proposed by a think tank back in the ’50s. They were trying to design long-term warning messages for nuclear waste sites. But in the bold march of time, languages die, symbols change meaning, and in the case of the “menacing earthworks” they were these huge dirt spike structures meant to elicit fear in anyone wandering nearby. That song, and lyrics, "this place is a message," feels like a cautionary warning, a jump off the diving board. The “feral in the grass” line was inspired by late summer in Massachusetts. There’s something about August on the East Coast that makes you want to roll around outside.
A lot of what you're doing on the record remind's me of the great Storefront Church album from last year - Ink & Oil which sort of deals with that same post-nuclear zeitgeist — the feeling of evil lurking, just there, always. He uses soundscapes to get that across, and it makes sense that the best music about that comes from ambient, electronic, collage-like sounds like yours.
Yeah, the more you grow and understand the context of our history, the more you realize we live in a very precarious moment in so many ways. There’s been a darkness — in myself and in the world — that maybe in past records I hadn’t fully embraced before. My earlier records felt more positive or warm, sometimes energetic or more soft. This one leans into that feeling of turmoil and darkness. But because of who I am as a songwriter, it still ends up with moments of fun or silliness. I never want to take anything too seriously — though you have to take it very seriously.
That’s what your record does — it challenges you to think about the world but also makes you move.
Yeah, I’m inspired by artists who pull emotional truth from abstraction. With all the political and social stuff right now — I think about Palestine all the time, and I think that we're having to withstand this mass gaslighting that the U.S. government, about what is actually going on over there. How can that not make you feel this complete disillusionment of any trust? "Plinth Parade," I feel, has some of that sentiment in it of where, this is what we're supposed to accept.
You’re very influenced by ambient music. You talk about not being overt but using sound to make people think — it reminds me of some of my favorite ambient music, like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, it’s all there if you listen,
Totally. I feel that way about a lot of Japanese music — and German psych music from the ’70s, like Can. Damo Suzuki’s lyrics are basically improvised nonsense, but with those hypnotic lock-groove rhythms, you can feel it. You can feel that thing in the air. That era in Germany is so interesting— they were the children of Nazis and they were living through what many of us are feeling now. “How do we build a positive future when the history of our world is cruelty and bloodshed?” That push to create something new resonates with me now. As an artist, I don’t know what else you do.
Talk to me about the "Midnight!" music video, which will be out soon.
My incredible friend Sammy Lamb directed it. It's the first Super Hit music video. It’s really special — I play a magician in the video. Music is magic. I think Kurt Vonnegut said it’s the closest proof of magic in this world. I don’t understand how sound works — how vibrations become emotion. I reread a couple Vonnegut novels recently, and that probably fueled some of the lyric writing on this album. That idea — that music is literal magic — it’s still unexplainable even when we understand the physics of sound.
I always love asking this question: on the first Super Hit album, the album’s called Super Hit, the band is Super Hit, and there’s a song called “Super Hit. - Like Black Sabbath, like Bad Company. Was that intentional?
I thought it was funny. It’s already funny when a band’s first album is self-titled — but then having a song with the same name, too? That cracked me up. The name Super Hit has stuck because it’s been with me since the beginning. It’s like a diary of my growth as an artist. Each album is a reflection of that trajectory. I like that something from that first record and something from Menacing Earthworks can coexist.
Listen to Menacing Earthworks below, and support Super Hit on Bandcamp, where you can purchase a limited edition vinyl version! Follow Super Hit on Instagram here.
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