In October 2019, Manae Hammond hopped in a car and drove from Chicago to Akron, Ohio, with her friend Eric Christopher. They’d known each other for a month, and they were heading to the first show by their band Hospital Bracelet. It’d been Christopher’s acoustic solo project for three months, and would end up operating as a live band for just five more before the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to concerts indefinitely. But though Hospital Bracelet had played only around 20 shows by then—including the 14 on their sole tour, to the east coast and back in January 2020—they swiftly sold out vinyl preorders for their debut album, South Loop Summer, ten months later.
“I hadn’t gone somewhere else to go play a show in a long time,” Hammond says. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this was kind of a lot to do, but I don’t care. This is so much fun.’ We drove seven hours there and seven hours back over the weekend. We played the show, came back, and just immediately started practicing more and more.”
“I wasn’t the biggest fan when I first listened to them,” Sulzer says. “I did enjoy the acoustic songs, but I didn’t love the sound of the original single for ‘Sober Haha JK Unless.’ I wasn’t that big a fan of the production value on it. My opinion didn’t really change until I heard the mixes of their new record. Then I was like, ‘Oh, they’re the real deal.’”
“There are a lot of states in the U.S. where you can’t wrestle until you’re 18,” Christopher says. “But I would travel to Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, New York—all over the place.” In September 2018, Chicago promoter Kaiju Attack Wrestling hosted a tag-team match that Christopher considers a career highlight—the opposing team included Shotzi Blackheart, who went on to join the WWE.
Chicago quickly reignited Christopher’s love of music—the spark was a show at suburban DIY space Panda Palace. “I immediately fell back in love with going to shows all over again,” Christopher says. They made friends with a few people from the local scene, including indie singer-songwriter Nayla Jungheim, who’d later record the material on Neutrality Acoustic.
Manae Hammond, 22, grew up around dance music—her mom is popular Chicago house DJ Lady D. For years Hammond resisted music’s call, but in middle school she got hooked on jazz and rock. As a seventh-grader, she enrolled in her school’s band class; she wanted to play drums, but that wouldn’t fly in her family’s 800-square-foot apartment. “I chose the trumpet, which makes no sense, but my mom was like, ‘OK, yeah, that’s more acceptable than the drums—you can mute a trumpet,’” Hammond says. “I did that for a year straight, and got my basic music education that way.”
