Claremont Cometh writeup, 7/31/2025, ahead of the first single:

I've been waiting for this record since it was a twinkle in Peter Hughes' email outbox.

Last fall he reached out to Snowy Halliwell, formerly of The Ocean Party and now of Melbourne-Sydney 6-piece Pop Filter, about making a record together. They meant to plan something remotely, but Peter (now devoting more time to his first love: automotive journalism) ended up in southeast Australia in January for an endurance race at Bathurst. They tracked at the band's country cabin studio in Yapeen with most of Pop Filter's Melbourne contingent: Snowy Halliwell (tech & guitars), Lachlan Denton (drums), Curtis Wakeling (bass), and Jordan Thompson (quite a few things). Snowy and Peter have been working the rest out over email for months, and now the masters are ready. Half-Staff Blues was finally announced on July 28th, 2025.

This is the first record since the DiskothiQ era where Peter Hughes' vocals & songwriting are backed by a full band, and his first record of his own material since 2010's concept album Fangio. Throughout the 1990's, DiskothiQ cranked the volume knob on ennui & abandonment, and ended with a big wink by releasing a duology of songs themed around NFL teams. Fangio is a GarageBand-assembled solo outing with Low-Life-era New Order stylistic sensibilities, and Peter classifies it as "commie synthpop." On that record, Peter's light vocals mix into the synth lines and drum tracks to present the record's protagonist: Juan Manuel Fangio, risen from the grave, driving a Saab 900 Turbo on a mission of revenge against everyone who ever opened and drained the veins of Latin America. The rage underlying that record is clear in its narrative—death to everyone who had a hand in this—but sublimated in the catchy melodies and what Peter calls the "Borgesian mechanism" at work, where consequences for the powerful are a beautiful, blood-drenched dream, carried out by a mythic figure in the cosmology of motorsports.

On Half-Staff Blues, we find Peter Hughes 15 years older, and 15 years angrier, and plain sick of it all. No more heroes, no more visions: the plane is going down with everybody in it. This record drifts through the modern U.S. American psyche in all its fractures. We visit with boomers in bar bands, hedge fund power vests, war criminals on permanent vacation, Reagan alumni, continuity of government, internet derangement. There is no appeal to the Worker to rise up, nor a grasp at something precious left of "our Democracy" to save, nor a reassurance that institutions or The Masses will save us in a great and momentous re-creation. Peter's announcement post on Instagram calls it, optimistically, "a bunch of songs about life in the imperial core as it enters its final death throes."

Crucially, though, this is a record. And it sounds phenomenal. Snowy Halliwell is no stranger to mixing high-energy records, after years of handling The Ocean Party, Pop Filter, and his own work in-house. Several songs on Half-Staff Blues fully rock out, and one even devolves into an intentionally hard-clipping meltdown that would have been at home on DiskothiQ's 1993 Shrimper cassette Harmless But Ultimately Unloveable, Loveless But Ultimately Unharmable, slamming all the way into the red. The acoustic numbers are also in good hands. Snowy's solo work often involves carefully layered, spacious mixes that travel lightly from ear-to-ear, arranged just-so, and he knows his Pop Filter cohort like the back of his hand.

This brings us to another highlight of Half-Staff Blues: Snowy has done a great service to longtime fans of Peter Hughes here in capturing and centering Peter's voice. There are layers of guitars both acoustic and electric, there are strings, there are keyboards and accordion, there are real drums. But everything folds in around Peter who, one year into retirement from his tenure with a certain other indie-rock outfit, is ready to emerge again as himself. There is no personal angst, no comic-book palette dream of vengeance. There is just Peter Hughes, 55 years old in the grip of History itself, hoping that what he's captured here are the last gasps of empire. Not the end of the world. Not oblivion, not Armageddon. The end of the empire, so that the world can go on turning. It's an idea he presents with an audible smile.

The video & first single drop on 8/1/2025, and Half-Staff Blues launches 9/5/2025 as a digital download. Peter has no plans for a physical release, but we here at the Claremont Cometh offices will keep a few dreams alive...

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