Plaka Notes #1: Curiosity Killed the Cat by Hey June!

Every time someone ponders the 'death' of Filipino rock, point at acts like Hey June!, busy keeping the flame alive by mining the recent past while continuing forward.

By now you know the “once monthly” thing the Once Monthly is built on is clearly a sham, considering all the other bits I sent out over the last twelve months. Let me add more. Here’s the first of a new, probably monthly, series called Plaka Notes, where I highlight a new and noteworthy release from Philippine musicians. (“Plaka” is Filipino for “record”, as in a vinyl record, although you can stream the albums I write about.) Ideally they’d be stuff that dropped over the past month, but I’m breaking that rule for the first ever installment…

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Every once in a while there’s always a think piece talking about whatever happened to Filipino rock. Those articles almost always look back fondly at the heyday of the Philippines’ alternative bands either in the 1990s or the mid-2000s, and lamenting that one does not hear them anymore, because everyone' chooses to listen to pop, or hip-hop—stuff that is almost always recorded only in the studio, with no live instruments, or so the sneering tone of such remarks suggests.

I came across one such piece on Billboard Philippines—I read it online, but it’s not there anymore, perhaps because it appears on the print version?—and, funnily, it refutes its own premise by talking about the state of the charts today. Really, though, if you’re looking for Pinoy bands to dominate, well, aren’t they doing just that? Legacy acts continue to get significant mileage on the streaming charts and on traditional media these days: just look at the buzz surrounding Rivermaya’s reunion concert with its most classic line-up. Meanwhile, newer acts are also breaking through: take Lola Amour and Dilaw, responsible for two of the biggest songs of 2023—and they got to perform with Coldplay in their recent Philippine stops, to boot.

Of course, the thing is, no one genre is dominant these days. It’s actually why this 35-year-old finds the Filipino music scene interesting again these days. Perhaps it’s all these avenues for music discovery. It used to be that you felt some whiplash when you heard, say, SB19 and Ben&Ben next to each other. And yes, I know they actually did two songs together—and that best illustrates how multiple genres are bobbing about in this pool in a way it never has before. P-pop, hip-hop, alternative of varying stripes, and even the good old ballad, no longer just for the older folks in the room, all floating about with equal time, give or take a prevailing trend or the algorithm’s fickle nature.

But, of course, it’s easy to slip on your rose-tinted glasses and look back at a time when things felt cooler. “Music back then was better because you had all these bands on the radio,” that sort of thing.

Of course, now, you’ll have to do a bit more digging to get there. I was late to Hey June!—please note that I have accepted that I will be late to a lot of things, to the point that the Once Monthly has embraced the mindset—until suddenly they were all over my feeds, in the days leading up to the release of their debut album, Curiosity Killed the Cat, which was also around the time they won People’s Voice Breakthrough Artist at the Awit Awards.

I finally listened to it last month and my first thought was, “is this a new band with veterans of the scene?”

Nope. A new band. Three members—is it officially three now or are there still technically four?—whose debut full-length outing, which dropped last November, sounds tight and confident. One expects—or maybe it’s just me, because again, my age—that this generation of bands would have different reference points, making music that feels fresh but also unknowingly appealing to the nostalgia of those in their 20s now. But the fascinating bit about Curiosity Killed the Cat is how its reference points are actually those very bands that came out of the 1990s and 2000s—those musicians whose dominance people my age can’t help but get nostalgic about.

I’m particularly keen about “Asan Ang Gana Ko”, which slightly channels something a little, or a lot, older—the tradition of the kundiman, or the traditional Filipino love song—but expressing concerns that’s more particular to today’s youth, and perhaps younger millennials like me, in a language that reminds me of the Eraserheads at their most accessible:

Asan nga ba ang gana ko?
Where did my motivation go?
Bigla na lang lumipad, jusko
It just flew away, my god
Tinatamaan ng katamaran
Laziness is hitting me
Ayoko sanang kumilos pa
I don’t want to move any more

On the other hand, there’s “LASIK”, which tells me of the imagination of the group. There’s been a lot of songs about how confusing things are until the right one comes along, but bad eyesight has never been really used as a metaphor much, has it?

Hanggang ikaw ay dumating
Until you came
Tinuro ka nila sa akin
They pointed you to me
Biglang liwanag ang mata
My eyes suddenly filled with light
Ako ay natulala
I was speechless
Ngayon ang lahat, ‘di na malabo
Now everything is not bleary
’Di ko kailangan ng salamin
I don’t need glasses anymore

I was ready to talk about how the band is indicative of the hopes some of us have for guitar-driven Filipino music with a bit more bite while still appealing to a wider audience. That bit about bite is important: a lot of the popular bands today mine the Filipino’s thing for love songs. I’m not complaining. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Even the dizzying heights Pinoy alternative reached decades ago were mostly grounded on pop-rock, on love songs with live instruments. But some tracks in the record—particularly the title track—sit comfortably in a college indie playlist of the cooler persuasion. It’s not exactly the crunchy power pop that Sandwich specializes in, but honestly, I got that feel from Hey June!—and I have the feeling they will be reaching newer, probably crunchier, heights in future releases.

And if you’re insisting on being a little cooler, there’s a lot of stuff out there that also flirts with the mainstream. Nameless Kids come to mind. I listened to Manila in Bloom, their full-length debut which dropped last September—a little too late for this feature, sadly—and it is drenched in that hard-to-capture “aesthetic” feel, a bit like shoegazer bands and dream pop with a sprinkling of 80s pop. Perhaps they leaned too much on the latter, because the production is too echo-y to the point of almost being cheap: the band sounds much better live. I should know. I have seen them live.

And, again, I am just dipping my feet back into local music, so there are a lot of names that weren’t around when I ended the old music blog five years ago. I have some work to do, I know.

But regardless of how behind I am or not, take this from me: whenever someone writes something about whether Filipino rock is dead, it’s always a good bet to say that it never did. I could go on about cycles of taste and gatekeepers’ need to have purpose and all that, but really, they’re always lurking at the margins. All we need is the right act at the right time to capture our imaginations. The fact that Hey June! comes in at a time when the road has been repaired and repaved for them is fortuitous. No more pressure to wave the flag until someone notices; all they have to do is be themselves. What would that second record sound like, I wonder?