I do my best to keep up with the music scene around Indy. I attend the house shows, I'm first in line for every show at the Vogue, I'm always checking the flyers hanging up at my local record shops, and I'm the shadow creeping around in the alleys outside the Gainbridge Fieldhouse after the big-name concerts get out. It's busy work, but somebody has to do it. By far my favorite band that's turned up from all this legwork has to be Hathaway. I’ve been following these guys since the release of their EP “What’s It To You?” last November. They announced the release of their debut album, “Odds + Ends,” around that same time, and you better believe that I have had that release date marked on my calendar since. Well, the day has come, or rather it came last week, but we’re talking about it now. The wait is over; “Odds + Ends” is here.
The album is ten songs, thirty-six minutes, of modern indie mastery. It has that raw garage band sound that their EP had, but it’s been honed to more of a point here. It seems to me that “What’s It To You?” was the band laying the groundwork for their sound. After listening to the EP again, I can hear much of what it is that makes “Odds + Ends” great, but the album has a little extra flavor to it that makes it uniquely Hathaway.
For one thing, the album ditches the heavy compression on the vocals that persisted throughout the EP. This makes it sound less like a demo cut in a home studio and more like a refined piece that has been doted over. With this, you lose some of that indie sound, but it also adds more variety to the vocals. When all of your tracks have the same effect on them, it gives them an overarching quality, which makes a single record sound like a cohesive piece, but if done over multiple releases, it could cause it to seem like you’re putting out multiple albums that sound exactly the same. All in all, I would say this move was a good one, not because the compression didn’t work on “What’s It To You?" because it absolutely did, but because it really lets the vocals shine through. I think this LP is the first Hathaway release that shows off just how talented a singer the band has. It’s the first that does justice to the group's electrifying live shows.
Another thing that is distinct about the new record is the incorporation of some electronic elements. The addition of synthesizers in several tracks is a tasteful one that helps to fill out the band's already powerful sound. It’s a sort of static energy that sticks to you; it gets under your skin and in your lungs and leaves you craving more. It amplifies that indie sound I loved on the EP while adding something that is their own. It’s the kind of thing that you never would have known they needed until they already had it.
Something else I can dig about this new record is how much cleaner the songwriting is. That may come as a surprise, as the raw sound of “What’s It To You?” was one of the things I loved most about the EP, and in fact, I still do. I think the growth in capability is what I’m appreciating here. Hathaway grew so much tighter over the course of writing “Odds + Ends.” You can hear that they’re more confident as a group; they still have that energy that drew me to their EP, but now it’s less of a wild blast and more of a steady flow. In the short months between the two records, the band has gone from writing the kind of stuff that demands to be blared over a cassette deck at max volume to making something that deserves to be listened to through a pair of studio headphones. “Odds + Ends” is the sort of record that you can appreciate like a fine wine. It’s something you have to get acquainted with. You should listen to it once for the experience, again to catch what you missed the first time, again to pick out the intricacies of the craftsmanship, and one more time just because it fucking rocks.
I can sit here all day telling you what I think about the album, but when asked, I think the band put it best. “We were trying really hard to sound like our influences at the time [of writing], bands such as The Killers and Panic! At the Disco. However, we couldn’t really figure out a direction in that vein that sounded like something we’d want to make. We began writing songs that simply came to us instead of trying to search for them. We entered into the studio with our EP’s producer, Corey Standifer, in December 2025. We recorded the whole album in 4 days. In that time, we perfected the Hathaway sound, and we created music that we thought was different from our previous work but still distinctly Hathaway.”
You can catch “Odds + Ends” streaming everywhere now. If you happen to be hanging around in Circle City right now, you can also pick up a physical copy at several record stores, including my go-to spot, Indy CD and Vinyl. If you liked “What’s It To You?" you're going to love “Odds + Ends.” So go give it a listen, and if you’re stepping on my turf, go pick up a copy to support a local band and business. While you’re doing that, I need to get back to the alley behind Gainbridge. Somebody has to be there scaring the tourists.
