It's Time To Get Feral In The Grass: Super Hit Talks New Album Menacing Earthworks
- Josh Kitchen
- 15 hours ago
- 8 min read
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 — you can hear the hard work that’s gone into your artistry over the past decade. I was listening to your self-titled album from a decade ago, and it's amazing to hear the growth.
Wow, yeah. I was going back and listening, and even that part of me is still in this record, which is really exciting. It feels like I never lost sight of my musical ethos. On this one, it’s like, “Oh yeah, this is what Super Hit means.” I know what I want to say and how I’m going to say it, and now I’m really saying it in a sick way.
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 a piece of art in its own right. It’s made with intention, with a humanist approach, trying to achieve one clear purpose. So that electrical panel on the cover — I found it through a surplus website. I scrolled through maybe 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 this image of 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 it. That song is personally nostalgic for me — the initial demo was a guitar riff I wrote in Vermont even before the first Super Hit album. I rarely revisit old material, but that one always stuck with me. “Story Time” became the first song where I felt like I was making commentary.
There’s this language in recent years — “tell your story.” But your “story,” in quotes, has become commodifiable.
Prepackaged - ready to go.
Exactly. If you’re an artist trying to reach an audience, people want a neatly 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 — like, let’s rest from all that performance of identity.
I love the opening lyrics, 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. If there’s any thread of concept, it’s there. 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 languages die, symbols change meaning, and they wanted something universally unsettling. The “menacing earthworks” were huge dirt spike structures meant to elicit fear in anyone wandering nearby. That song 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, totally. The more you grow and understand the context of our history, the more you realize we live in a very precarious moment. There’s been darkness — in myself and in the world — that maybe I hadn’t fully embraced before. My earlier records felt more positive or warm. This one leans into that turmoil. 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 turmoil right now — Palestine especially — it’s hard not to feel disillusioned. The U.S. government’s gaslighting around what’s happening makes it worse. That feeling of, “This is what we’re supposed to accept? Welcome to the system. Good luck.” That’s in “Plinth Parade.”
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. That era in Germany fascinates me — they were the children of people who lived through horror, and they were asking, “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.
Even when I hear the early stuff and cringe a bit, I want to allow it to stand as an honest expression of where I was.
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.
