Kerry Alexander

Bad Bad Hats

By Matthew Trammell
The Minneapolis, Minnesota duo Bad Bad Hats are named after a little-known song from “Madeline,” a beloved children’s book series about a mischievous young girl and her yellow-clad classmates. Founded by singer/songwriter Kerry Alexander and guitarist Chris Hoge, the band traffics in similarly playful concepts and warm scenes of youth. Bad Bad Hats are celebrated for crispy, lived-in melodies, big choruses that stick for days, and an easy musicianship that carries across their eclectic, wide-ranging releases.
The band's lead singer Kerry Alexander grew up between Tampa, Florida and Birmingham, Alabama. As a child, she was a student of the glossy MTV pop that defined the early 2000s, as well as the David Bowie and Tom Petty CDs her parents would play while making dinner. Singer-songwriters like Alanis Morissette, Kim Deal, and later, Michelle Branch, were an early inspiration for Kerry: after discovering songwriting as a profession while watching American Idol, the teenaged Kerry began filling binders with songs, planning to one day write hit records for stars.
As her confidence grew, Kerry began testing her performance chops at open mic nights, and eventually began sharing demos on Myspace, where she first connected with Chris Hoge, a savvy guitarist and classmate at the small liberal arts school Macalester College. The pair’s
chemistry was undeniable, sharing common tastes in songwriting and sound, and they flourished creatively--and, soon, as a couple. They refined demos together and gigged around the Twin Cities, where they received consistently strong responses from friends who’d come to their shows. Soon, Kerry and Chris were assembling their first EP, "It Hurts," and catching the ear of local indie labels. After fleshing out the line up with bassist Noah Boswell, Bad Bad Hats was officially born.
"Psychic Reader," BBH’s debut LP, arrived in 2015. Led by the ebullient single “Midway,” the album highlighted the band’s cinematic sound, punchy rhythm sections, and Kerry’s heart-aching vocals. With "Psychic Reader," the band expanded their audience beyond local Twin Cities venues, as their music spread organically via college radio and shared links. New fans seemed to discover the music daily, their growth coinciding with a renaissance in young bedroom musicians via streaming through the 2010s. With their follow up full-length albums “Lightning Round” (2018) and “Walkman” (2021), Bad Bad Hats expanded their sound and look, with hilariously DIY music videos that cast the band as ice hockey players, Elvis impersonators, secret agents and more. In the years since their initial noodling around St. Paul, Bad Bad Hats have toured globally with peers like The Beths and Hippo Campus, and storied acts like The Front Bottoms and the aforementioned Michelle Branch, who picked them up for her 2022 headlining world tour. It was a full-circle moment for Kerry, one that she made clear on stage at each show.
The Bad Bad Hats fanbase has grown into an active, engaged community, who have enjoyed up-close access to the band via their Patreon. Beginning in the Fall of 2020, Hats invited fans into their creative process: Kerry would collect prompts from listeners, and write one-off songs based on the requests their fans made. The untraditional process provided an ever-renewing source of inspiration, as well as a bit of breathing room from the typical constraints of recording with self-ascribed parameters and intentions--the band ended up writing country, pop punk, surf rock, disco, and countless other genres and structures they might never have otherwise. This period of exploration and exchange planted the seeds for what was slowly becoming a new album: tracks like the jangling, new-wave bop “TPA” and the pep-rock anthem “Bored in the Summer” began to shape their current anything-goes sound and direction.
Last January, Kerry and Chris cozied up under frigid winter in their Twin Cities home and set upon creating a new album. Each day for two weeks, joined by longtime bandmate Con Davison, Kerry would make sandwiches for lunch (tuna salad on Tuesdays), and the crew would get to work in a basement home studio, stacked to the brim with gear. They recorded more quickly than usual, emboldened by their fan-led songwriting practice. Where BBH are typically known for big song topics like love and heartache, Kerry was taken by smaller ideas this go round—included on the record are songs about parking tickets, scorching Tampa grocery store lots she remembered from her youth, and other intimate autobiographical scenes woven into dancefloor-ready numbers.
Today, Bad Bad Hats are back to their founding duo, and their latest album is the band’s first time self-producing, with a freewheeling, pristine tone and several unexpectedly funky turns. Bad Bad Hats suggests a band still gleaning deep fun from creating and playing, inviting both new and old listeners to live life to their heartfelt tunes. "Bad Bad Hats" will be available on April 12th, 2024 via Don Giovanni Records.