Album Of The Week: Mallory Hawk Chinook

1:00 PM EDT on July 28, 2026

Self-Released
2026

Who needs a style when you’ve got the songs?

We’re living in a musical landscape mediated by algorithmic overlords, in which listeners often seek to be soothed by (possibly evil) ambient tones, burrow deeper into (often frictionless) aesthetics they already like, and passively consume (AI-generated?) tracks suited for various lifestyle functions. People of taste have been decrying the public’s preference for familiar slop over challenging, adventurous, hard-to-categorize art from time immemorial, but in the music world, the streaming era has intensified the primacy of vibes over tunes. Mallory Hawk’s Chinook flies in the face of that conventional wisdom.

I use the language of aviation pointedly, and not just because the Philadelphia singer-songwriter chose to shorten her surname Hawkins to evoke a bird of prey. Chinook is named for the helicopters that dotted the sky during Hawk’s childhood in the military hub of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her father reportedly called the double-propellered Chinook CH-47 “the only helicopter in the world that can collide with itself,” giving Hawk a metaphor for her own tendency to tirelessly care for those around her, to her own detriment. These 10 songs find her reckoning with that pattern — a thematic throughline on an album that jumps around genres like an iPod on shuffle.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Though Chinook is Hawk’s first solo album, she co-fronted the Brooklyn post-punk band Customer, was a side player in the heartland-rock-ish LVL UP offshoot Trace Mountains, and joined Dublin rabble rousers M(h)aol as a touring bassist, in addition to a long stint co-running the essential indie-pop label Double Double Whammy. That experience all falls under the same big underground rock umbrella, but it demonstrates how versatile Hawk can be. On Chinook, she further indulges her impulse toward variety.

Opener “The Mirror” echoes noisy indie elders like Sonic Youth and their poppier alt-rock descendents, and then “D’Anger” pivots to dance-punk. “Revolver,” a poppy acoustic rock track fit for ‘90s VH1 rotation, leads into the brooding indie-folk of “Four O’Clocks,” then the spunky garage-punk track “Caretaker.” That’s just the first half of the tracklist, before you get to the new wave propulsion of “Superhighway” and the drunkenly swaying country rock of “Rotten Man.” It really can sound like a different record from track to track, save for the tender, weary narrator at its core.

If Hawk were a more mercenary artist, it would be easy to hear Chinook as a producion and songwriting portfolio demonstrating how many different styles she can pull off. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine label heads rejecting the project because it doesn’t fit neatly into one box and therefore they don’t know how to market it. Maybe that’s how Hawk ended up self-releasing this body of work. Yet the wide stratum of sounds helps Chinook to stand out, and the frequent shifts between genres encourage listener engagement. You may be perplexed by where the music goes next, but you’ll rarely catch yourself in a stupor.

It helps that the various styles are executed with expertise. Working with producer Samuel Acchione, Hawk brings each track to life with modest but effective arrangements that always serve the song. When they need to, the guitars slice (“The Mirror”), soothe (“Four O’Clocks”), or ominously crunch (“Felicity”). Logan Roth is adept at adding zippy synth sounds as desolately swinging piano chords, and Tree Palmedo’s French horn and flugelhorn lend regal beauty to “Four O’Clocks.” Hawk’s vocal melodies consistently stand out; I especially enjoy the way “Caretaker” builds to multiple shout-along hooks. “I’m not your caretaker!” she exclaims, accentuating each staccato note with an exclamation point, then declares, “I’m out/ Of my mind,” extending the final word into a series of wobbling syllables. A few seconds later, on “Low Rise,” she’s eerily bending her voice around minor-key guitar riffs, pulling off an entirely different tone as she reflects on religious guilt.

An album like this one depends a lot on its lyrics, and Hawk delivers a string of memorable lines throughout. “Felicity,” a song about longing for someone whose affection has proven elusive, evolves from “What’s another day alone?” to “What’s another year alone?” as Hawk fills in the space between those refrains with the numbing mundanities of modern survival: “The groceries, the service fees/ I can’t count them all.” Relational politics take center stage again on “Superhighway” as she details relatable confusion: “Call you back tonight/ I mean it this time/ It’s heavy on my mind/ But I can’t think straight.” On closer “Rabbit Hole,” her depiction of her own frustrated attraction is mesmerizing: “One day, I’ll tell you/ How I feel about the stranger I created/ Make no mistake/ You make no mistakes in my head/ I mean it.”

Chinook’s best moment is one of its lightest, musically speaking. “Revolver” dips, dives, and soars in its reclamation of Lilith Fair-era folk-pop. The song boasts Hawk’s stickiest hook on the chorus, as she repeats the phrase “I wondered why.” Its arrangement — performed entirely by Hawk and Acchione, save for backing vocals by Ava Mirzadegan — is a subtly morphing marvel. “You saw me at my worst/ Does it get any better than this?,” Hawk wonders, setting up one of the album’s finest lyrical turns: “Had to change to learn to love/ Had to learn to love change.” The track reaches its climax when she pushes her voice to its upper reaches and pleads, “Come right back,” a moment of pathos infused with musical dynamism.

Chinook beautifully conveys that kind of relatable aching again and again. It’s an album about the everyday agony and ecstasy of human relationships, the deep feelings that animate our daily drudgery. That sort of drama seeps into so many different contexts, gnaws at us whether we’re running errands or attending a party or endlessly scrolling in bed. So it’s fitting that on Hawk’s album, her internal turmoil spills into many kinds of sonic environments, permeating the atmosphere of bangers, ballads, and everything in between. In that sense, perhaps it’s offering an artisanal alternative to the mood machine: a handcrafted song for every part of your day.

Chinook is out 7/31. Pre-order it here.

Other albums of note out this week: