Now That’s What I Call ‘Little Hag!’
Avery Mandeville’s Having Some Fun with Her Misery
Words & Photos by Joshua Perna
After four years as a band and a decade as a gigging musician, New Jersey based artist Little Hag has just released her third full-length record on Bar None Records. With lyrics that cut and a live show that wrests a smile, singer-songwriter Avery Mandeville is a mess of contradictions.
“Hiiii. Inside lucky 7s. I forgot i look SO bad today lmao.”
This is the message I receive from Avery Mandeville, better known as “Little Hag,” shortly after reminding her of our scheduled photo shoot. As I hop out of my car I assure her that we’re all melting; we are two weeks into a notable heat wave in the dog days of the New Jersey summer. Today we’ll be outdoors in Downtown Jersey City – Harsimus Cove to be exact – where Little Hag is about to play the outdoor stage at Lucky 7 Tavern for their annual block party.
Whether ‘Little Hag’ is Mandeville herself or the band in which she plays seems to depend on the day. Little Hag, – the band, that is– consists of a semi-rotating cast of musicians, many of whom have been with Mandeville for years. Little Hag’s third LP, entitled Now That’s What I Call Little Hag, has finally been released after months of build up, and this show is but one of many in a schedule that is impressively packed for an artist who is not touring full time.
“I don't know why I still do it, because it doesn't make any sense."
“I don't know why I still do it, because it doesn't make any sense."
As the DJ lowers the house music and the event’s MC announces the band, the crowd – several hundred strong by this point in the afternoon – begin to draw closer to the stage in the vacuum of anticipatory silence. Instead of beginning the set with a bang, Mandeville starts the set alone, timidly singing the beginning of “The Whole World,” accompanied only by her guitar.
The whole world wanted to sit next to me,
So I put my feet up on the seat…
And they moved on.
The band erupts, the crowd leans in further.
With three albums released in the span of four calendar years and nearly one hundred independently booked shows, Little Hag has wasted no time covering immense amounts of ground in the first act of their career. But below the surface of an already impressive resume is an artist who has been at this for over a decade. The relationship Mandeville has with her artistry seems to be one of compulsion. “I don't know why I still do it, because it doesn't make any sense,” she says, “but I guess it's probably because I don't really feel like I have a choice. If I had a choice, I would stop.”
Mandeville, born and raised on the Jersey shoreline, spent the early days of her career cutting her teeth in the musically infamous Asbury Park, playing hundreds of shows from the shoreline to the greater tri-state area and rest of the country. In a mythical anecdote, she remembers receiving a $20 bill from Bruce Springsteen as she busked in Red Bank (she planned on framing the twenty but soon needed it to pay for gas.) Little Hag’s first LP, Whatever Happened to Avery Jane?, is less a traditional debut album as much as a primer on everything accomplished by Mandeville before the formal beginning of the band.
The record, 10 songs in length, is a collection of both released and unreleased songs from her stint performing under her own name. With tracks such as “Tetris,” “No More Dick Pix,” and “Walk of Shame,” Mandeville used this album as a sort of “greatest hits” collection of everything she had done up until that point. The songs are irreverent, self-effacing, and funny as they deal with topics much heavier than their tone belies: sexual predation, misogyny in the independent music scene, and the self-inquiry of bad habits, to name a few. “A lot of those songs are extremely old,” says Mandeville when asked about the record. “I first released it in 2018, so that means I wrote those songs from 2010 to 2017… and they’re cringey as hell. A song called ‘Facebook’? It just doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.”
Today’s setlist consists of a handful of Little Hag’s hits mixed with unreleased tracks from the upcoming record. Her usual lineup has been shaken up today due to an illness in the band – “Don’t be surprised if it’s a bit of a shitshow up there” she warns me – so the set list veers away from the more complicated numbers from her catalog. The set leans into the essential strength of Little Hag: raw singer-songwriter tunes packaged in a punchy, hard hitting post-grunge arrangement.
The response from the crowd is nearly instantaneous. Mandeville is all smiles on stage, welcoming the crowd further and further into the experience. Her vocals are crystal clear and vulnerable; she warbles, she screams, she puts on campy affectation to accentuate portions of her lyrics. Whether you’ve seen the band a dozen times or it’s your first time here, it’s nearly impossible not to root for them. Mandeville is bearing the awkwardness and aggravation of her past experience with a smile, and the effect it has on the crowd is obvious.
Much of today’s set is from Little Hag’s second album, Leash. The band explodes into the track “Brass Knuckle Keychain.”
Walking with my pepper spray
I dare someone to fuck with me
Man I’ve had the longest day
If you come close, you’re history
The crowd leans in once again, and the dancing continues.
"I love playing shows ... I just get to enjoy myself and be loud and crazy and run around."
"I love playing shows ... I just get to enjoy myself and be loud and crazy and run around."
“I love playing shows more than I like recording and releasing music, because playing the show is like the easy part. I just get to enjoy myself and be loud and crazy and run around.”
While technically a sophomore release for Little Hag, Leash is, for all intents and purposes, Mandeville’s debut album. “Leash is cool,” she tells me, “it’s not as fully realized as I wish it was, but ‘Schlub’ is probably the best song I’ve ever written.”
While singles “Blood” and “Get Real!” were repurposed after getting small releases under Mandeville’s original eponymous project, the other nine songs of the album were brand new and a statement on the direction that the band was going in. With most of the album being produced by a single collaborator, Dana Yurcisin, the album possesses a coherence and singularity of sound. Compared to Little Hag’s first LP, which was functionally a series of demos written across 6 years and even more recording locations, this coherence creates a transparency that allows Mandeville’s voice – both physical and poetic – come to the forefront.
Part garage rock, part grunge, drawing influence from a slew of 90’s and early 2000’s alternative rock outfits, the album is a soup of love, anger, awkwardness, and defiance. There is a raw nerve exposed in much of Mandeville’s writing, songs that poetically dance around the most vulnerable parts of her experience and memory. Other songs are almost comedic in nature, acting as a scathing and punchy reflection on the more mundane and universal experiences of her life. On the single “Blood,” Mandeville writes about a late period, wishing she would see the tell-tale sign of not being pregnant, singing “But this one thing's/ Gonna kill the vibes/ I might hit someone/ Just to see some blood.”
And yet, as I watch Mandeville performing this record, the visceral piss and vinegar of her lyrics are far away. She sings them with a smile. As the band closes their set with “Blood”, she jumps and dances, with much of the crowd following suit. At this point in the set, she has pulled her hair out of the bun that it started in and is whipping it around with abandon.
I know the words being spoken here are ones of pain and discontent, but all I’m seeing on stage is borderline celebration. It seems that the trauma spoken about in the record is neutralized when performed on stage, even if just for the moment it’s being sung about.
If Leash served as a statement on consistency and minimalism, Little Hag’s newest album is a rejection of that. Now That’s What I Call Little Hag – the title serving as a tongue-in-cheek parody of the Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation series that was popular at the turn of the millennium– is a maximalist compilation of Mandeville’s taste and influences. “This album is like if one small bitch tried to make as many different types of songs as possible in as many genres and vibes as possible,” she says happily.
Produced by nine different producers at eight different studios, this 13 track offering makes no apologies for covering an immense amount of musical ground. From the Nine Inch Nails inspired opening track, “The Machine,” Mandeville makes it incredibly apparent that this album is nothing like her former work. “This album is definitely more sonically diverse and, I would say, more thematically interesting than Leash,” explains Mandeville, when asked to compare the two records. “Yes, it's a lot of heartbreak and relationship type of songs on both albums, but on [the new record], I think it's more… I don't know. There’s just more variety.”
"It's a testament to all the different talents of people who I collaborated with on this one."
"It's a testament to all the different talents of people who I collaborated with on this one."
The album swings wildly between trip-hop (“All 3”), dance (“You Blew It”), indie rock (“Oops!”,) and every conceivable permutation of genre you can find between them. Some songs eschew any easy labeling altogether, while a song like “God I’m So Annoying” strips all pretense away to leave Mandeville alone with an acoustic guitar. Any patterns that were created with her first two albums are happily done away with as we get a maximalist and unfiltered view of Little Hag’s writing, equal parts curated and uncurated.
In the same way that the Now That’s What I Call Music series served as an annual compilation and thesis statement on what was occurring in pop during any one year, it seems that Little Hag’s third album is a compilation disk of their own. The record spans the various sounds, genres, and people that have gotten Mandeville through the last two years. “I think that's why the album sounds the way that it sounds… there were so many hands in creating it,” explains Mandeville on the process of recording the new album. “Every song has the personal twist and touch of the different individuals that worked on the song… It's a testament to all the different talents of people who I collaborated with on this one, which is why it has such a collaborative sound.”
As the set ends, the crowd returns back to loudly conversing over the house music being played by the DJ. The band begins breaking down their gear. Event staff does the often thankless job of facilitating changeover for the next artist on the bill. Mandeville, now slick with sweat and rosy cheeked from an athletic performance in the oppressive humidity and heat, has abandoned the shirt she was originally wearing. “I’d give you a hug but you do not want to hug me,” she jokes.
As she makes her way through the crowd accepting compliments and making quick conversation with acquaintances from the music scene, it’s obvious to see where her on-stage magnetism comes from. Where she was once the self-proclaimed mayor of Red Bank in the Asbury Park music scene, she has spread her musical-political-influence further throughout the reaches of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. A large smile with an easy laugh, large blue eyes and a shock of red hair, it’s easy to miss the pained lyricist of Little Hag behind the smiling face that sings those same words into a microphone.
But it’s that juxtaposition that makes Little Hag so alluring. We love to see Avery Mandeville having some fun with her misery.