Hot Mulligan headlined the Hollywood Palladium on Nov 19th 2025 and that’s important. I’ll tell you why.
What qualifies as “Emo” has shifted dramatically in many waves throughout the years. There are some that consider 90’s Midwestern Emo like American Football to be the pinnacle of the genre, while others look all the way back to the 1980’s melodic hardcore projects like Embrace and Jawbreaker as the roots of the scene. Regardless, true up-and-coming Emo artists have been relegated to the underground again in the post-Hot Topic and MCR years of pop culture, with many of them choosing to take influence from all waves of Emo rather than wasting time with arguing about “what real Emo music truly is”.
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Hot Mulligan are one of the few Emo bands in more recent years to transcend out of the underground and into more mainstream status, as evidenced by their Hollywood Palladium headlining show on November 19, 2025. Just because they have reached the status of headlining a venue as massive as The Palladium doesn’t mean they have forgotten their underground punk roots however. Hot Mulligan wants to emphasize that they still stand with the day-one fans from their days of playing smaller DIY punk venues, hosting an all-star lineup of current leaders in the Emotional Hardcore ethos; the post-hardcore powerhouses Drug Church and Anxious, along with bedroom pop and shoegaze-influenced Arm’s Length. The crowd of The Palladium was full of more working class hardcore kids than the Warped Tour teased hair audience, but the feelings and tears in the room were just as intense as Hot Mulligan brought the “hardcore” back to the “emo” “emotional hardcore” scene.
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Kicking off the evening was Anxious, a Connecticut band that you tend to see on more hardcore lineups than pop-punk or emo ones; but they can truly fit anywhere with their passionate sound that’s equally sad as it is uplifting. JankySmooth has covered Anxious before when they have played Sound And Fury Festival in the past, but they are branching out far beyond the hardcore scene that they are rooted in as they become more popular. Unfortunately the stagedives and on-stage dogpiles that we’ve come to expect from Anxious shows were not present due to The Palladium’s barrier, but the cathartic release of every emotion on the spectrum was still present with the chaos they manage to bring to any room they play. Seeing Anxious always feels like a communal ceremony, and they bring that energy just as hard when seeing them in a larger space.
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Arm’s Length slowed things down quite a bit and offered the crowd a more somber and reflective side of the Emo sound, incorporating a lot more shoegaze and bedroom-pop elements. They definitely appealed to the audience in the room that prefers Midwestern Emo like American Football rather than the more post-hardcore elements of the genre. Even with how different their energy was from Drug Church or Anxious, they fit in perfectly on the lineup closing the gap between the two extremes of Emo music. While the other openers were on the heavier side, Hot Mulligan’s fanbase does consist of more pop-punk and Midwestern Emo fans than hardcore ones. It’s awesome that they wanted to showcase the more exciting future elements of the genre, but Arm’s Length created a perfect balance for the evening and brought the entire room to a very emotional level that is impressively rare to pull off in a venue as large as The Palladium.
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Drug Church is a band that needs little introduction if you’ve read JankySmooth or any of our Sound And Fury Fest coverage in the past. They are consistently one of the most innovative bands in the greater circle of hardcore music, never limiting themselves to a specific subgenre and reinventing themselves with every album they put out. That shouldn’t be surprising to anybody with Patrick Kindlon’s pedigree in experimental music that somehow finds its way onto hardcore lineups, being the founder of Self Defense Family as well. While all of his projects are life-changing spiritual experiences when seen in a smaller setting, Drug Church can hypnotize any crowd they play to no matter how large the setting.
Kindlon is an absolute madman on stage with how spastically he runs in all directions and physically makes an effort to include himself in the crowd, making everybody in attendance feel as if they are on-stage with him. Only a true punk-rock veteran can pull this off on such a large scale, and Drug Church have proven themselves to be included amongst the greats of the hardcore genre for many years now. When you see that Drug Church is listed on a lineup, you should be at least 5x as excited as you were about the show beforehand.
It truly is amazing how thoughtful Hot Mulligan was surrounding the openers they hand-picked for this tour, wanting to show casual listeners how much more that Emo and Post-Hardcore music has to offer. However, this doesn’t mean that they passed on all of the hard work to their contemporaries in any way. Hot Mulligan was the headliner and the finale of the evening, and they treated this title with as much reverence as possible with the amount of fanservice they provided to all of the diehard Emos in the audience. With a setlist consisting over 20 songs after an already-long evening, Hot Mulligan took on the ambitious feat of hosting a borderline mini-fest at The Palladium that evening.
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While most of the setlist did consist of tracks from their newest album “The Sound A Body Makes When It’s Still”, the fans did not seem to mind at all with how consistent Hot Mulligan has been throughout their discography. The fans love the new material just as much as the older stuff, and it’s more exciting to see what the band has to offer moving forward rather than living in Emo’s past scenes. This entire evening was about moving forward as elderly Emos rather than falling into the trap of nostalgia. With all of these fresh new artists opening and the focus being on their newest release, Hot Mulligan refuses to live in the past and they refuse to let their fans stay stuck in the past as well.
Words by Danny Ryan
Photos by Chris Mounts
