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    Dressed for Success: 7 Bands in Uniform

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    Hear songs by the White Stripes, Destiny’s Child and more.The White Stripes’ Meg and Jack White.Oscar Hidalgo for The New York TimesDear listeners,Today’s Amplifier is based on an idea my colleague Jon Pareles mentioned when he was working on a profile of Devo: How about a playlist of bands that wear uniforms?That prompt got me thinking, of course, of Devo’s fire-engine red “energy dome” hats. But also of doo-wop groups and early rockers in matching duds, of country acts in custom Nudie suits, and of girl groups past and present in coordinated colors. Clearly a playlist was in order.There are plenty of different reasons musicians wear uniforms. Sometimes — especially in the case of Motown groups — matching outfits bring an air of polish and professionalism. They’re also a handy and enduring means of visual branding; if you see a scrawny dude with shaggy hair in ripped jeans and a black leather jacket, a song by the Ramones just might pop into your head. But even when a strict sartorial aesthetic risks becoming a gimmick, it can also keep the focus on the music. As Meg White told The Guardian in a 2005 interview, speaking of the White Stripes’ red-and-white dress code, “like a uniform at school, you can just focus on what you’re doing because everybody’s wearing the same thing.”Today’s playlist is a brief sonic tour through some of music’s most iconic uniforms. It contains quite a few omissions, though. I featured Kraftwerk on Tuesday’s playlist, so I didn’t want to repeat myself — even though their robotic coordinated costumes are totally worth mentioning. I also wish I could have included the proto-punk group the Monks, who often dressed like their namesakes, but the band’s great 1966 album “Black Monk Time” isn’t available on any streaming platforms. (If you haven’t heard it, try to find it in a more old-fashioned way. It rules.)That still left me with plenty of uniformed groups to choose from. Today’s playlist finds the common threads (get it?) shared by the Hives and the Temptations, Devo and Destiny’s Child. Put on your energy dome and press play.Listen on Spotify as you read.1. Devo: “Uncontrollable Urge”The members of Devo often use their extensive collection of matching uniforms — trust me, the “Outfits” section of the Devo Wiki is quite lengthy — as social commentary, poking fun at the mentality of conformism they perceive in modern life. That commentary, though, has always been cut with a absurdist twist, whether they’re clad in electric-yellow jumpsuits, matching silver blazers or, of course, those iconic flowerpot hats. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Ramones: “Cretin Hop”From their adopted last names to their standard-issue outfit of tight jeans, T-shirts, shaggy haircuts and — crucially — black leather jackets, the Ramones were all about simplicity, minimalism and uniformity. Those same virtues also applied to the band’s all-killer, no-filler sound. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Maddox Brothers & Rose: “Empty Mansions”The early country pioneers the Maddox Brothers & Rose were “the best-dressed people in country and western,” according to one of their contemporaries. The Maddox family’s flashy, elaborately embroidered matching suits (plus custom cowgirl skirts for Rose) were the work of Nathan Turk, whose designs echoed the group’s energetic sound. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the group blazed a spangled, sparkling path that plenty of country acts would later follow. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Temptations: “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”Elegant matching outfits lent Motown artists — like the Supremes, the Four Tops and the Temptations — a sheen of professionalism. But they also reflected the strict aesthetic vision of the Motown founder Berry Gordy, who wanted his groups to project a specific type of aspirational glamour that would appeal to white listeners. Like many vocal groups in the doo-wop tradition, the Temptations were at first known for their slick, color-coordinated suits. But in the late 1960s, as their sound began to move in a more psychedelic direction, the Temptations, tellingly, began to embrace more outré sartorial styles. (Listen on YouTube)5. The White Stripes: “The Union Forever”Jack and Meg White’s peppermint-candy color palette gave the duo an us-against-the-world camaraderie — which got a little complicated when people realized that the Whites were not, as they’d initially said, brother and sister, but rather a formerly married couple. Whatever works! (Listen on YouTube)6. The Hives: “Main Offender”The White Stripes weren’t the only stars of the early 2000s garage-rock revival to embrace the uniform. The zany Swedish rockers the Hives — who returned earlier this year with their first album in a decade — made stage-wear fun again with their bold black-and-white suits. (It wasn’t until they made it big, though, that they could afford to launder them properly. Said the drummer Chris Dangerous in a Times profile earlier this year, their earliest suits “smelled so bad, when we walked onstage at the end of the tour, the audience stepped back.”) (Listen on YouTube)7. Destiny’s Child: “So Good”Destiny’s Child updated the sound — and, of course, the look — of the girl group during its reign in the late ’90s and early 2000s. In coordinated outfits designed by Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, the girls glittered in green at the Grammys and, in the “Survivor” video, projected strength in matching camo prints. As the group’s lineup went through some notorious changes, the matching outfits perhaps served the more practical purpose of reminding people who, at any given time, was actually in Destiny’s Child. (Listen on YouTube)Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, y-y-y-y-y-y-y-yeah!,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Bands in Uniform” track listTrack 1: Devo, “Uncontrollable Urge”Track 2: The Ramones, “Cretin Hop”Track 3: The Maddox Brothers & Rose, “Empty Mansions”Track 4: The Temptations, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”Track 5: The White Stripes, “The Union Forever”Track 6: The Hives, “Main Offender”Track 7: Destiny’s Child, “So Good”Bonus TracksFirst, a quick correction from Tuesday’s newsletter, in which I mistakenly implied that Coldplay did not have permission to use the riff from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” for the 2005 hit “Talk.” They did, in fact, get the OK from Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter.Also, the aforementioned Jon Pareles took over our Friday Playlist this week, choosing new songs from the Rolling Stones, Kali Uchis, Caroline Polachek and more. Listen here. More

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      Back in Black and White: It’s the Hives

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      Onstage at the cozy Chelsea club Racket in May, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist had an important announcement.“Ladies and gentlemen!” the frontman shouted to the mess of bopping heads and airborne limbs gathered before him. “Due to an unfortunate rift in the time-space continuum, it has been 11 years since the Hives played New York.” He tossed his arms triumphantly in the air, as if landing a triple axel. “We are back!” The crowd gleefully erupted.The Hives, a five-piece punk band from Sweden, released five studio albums from 1997 to 2012, making their biggest splash with the single “Hate to Say I Told You So” — a garage-rock gem that spent 11 weeks on the Hot 100 when the group’s second LP, “Veni Vidi Vicious,” arrived in the United States in 2002.The band got swept into the “rock revival” of the moment alongside the White Stripes and the Vines. But they had already made their name onstage, where their arsenal includes matching black-and-white suits and instruments, Almqvist’s high kicks and charming provocations, roadies dressed like ninjas and a guitarist called Nicholaus Arson who sneers, crowd surfs and dramatically blows on his curled fingers as he flicks picks into the crowd.“They’re probably the best live band I’ve ever seen,” said Max Kuehn, the drummer of the California surf-punk band Fidlar, who was honored when the Hives took his group on the road for its first national tour. “If you go to a lot of shows,” he added, “you can really tell the difference of just how tight their songs are and how rehearsed everything is.”Though the Hives continued to play concerts every year since the arrival of “Lex Hives” in 2012, they had no fresh music to offer — until now. On Friday they will unleash “The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons,” 12 new tracks filled with head-snapping riffs and shout-along choruses led by the explosive single “Bogus Operandi.”“There was a lot of time where we didn’t have songs,” Almqvist said as the quintet gathered at a rooftop restaurant in Manhattan two days after the Racket show, dressed ­­— you guessed it — in matching Hives daywear, white denim jackets with black shirts and jeans. “It was like a slow, 10-year-long panic,” he joked with a slight accent, adding a dose of classic Hives bravado: “It was never an outright panic because we continued to be so immensely popular worldwide.”“But,” he added, “it sucks being in a good band that doesn’t make new music.”The Hives, from left: The Johan and Only, Vigilante Carlstroem, Pelle Almqvist, Chris Dangerous and Nicholaus Arson.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesThe Hives have never seemed at risk of running out of steam. Almqvist and Arson, brothers born a year apart, grew up in Fagersta, a small city a two-hour drive from Stockholm, where they soaked up every punk record they could get their hands on ­— trading tapes, scraping together money for imports, taking in pals’ rejects. “That’s how we found the Sonics,” Arson said. A friend handed the LP over, “and it kind of blew our minds.” The guitarist rattled off a list of acts that had made an impact on them: the New Bomb Turks, the Oblivians, the Remains, the Misfits, the Dead Kennedys, “a lot of ’60s music.”The original band — the brothers plus the guitarist Vigilante Carlstroem, the drummer Chris Dangerous and the bassist Dr. Matt Destruction — came together in the ’90s when the members were in their teens, and “the mosh pit thing was big for us,” Almqvist said. “Going nuts and falling over each other was for us always a part of the concert experience. If the crowd wasn’t doing that, it didn’t feel interesting.”Showmanship was a priority from day one. “I think before we were good, we were entertaining,” added Almqvist, who is known for his strutting and agitating. (In June, he split his head open with a swinging mic.) “People who didn’t like us would still watch us doing whatever we were doing, because no one kind of knew what was going to happen.”The music was fast; Almqvist’s wit matched it. “We grew up on 50 percent punk and 50 percent stand-up comedy,” Arson said, including “Saturday Night Live” reruns on MTV and VHS tapes of Eddie Murphy specials.Before they could afford props, the Hives thrifted black and white clothes, painted a guitar and made their own light-up sign that blazed onstage, giving them heat rash. Almqvist estimates they played 500 shows in their first suits. “They smelled so bad,” Dangerous said, “when we walked onstage at the end of the tour, the audience stepped back.”But the efforts paid off. The Scottish music business icon Alan McGee became an early supporter, putting out a greatest hits of sorts called “Your New Favourite Band” in 2001, which brought the Hives wider attention from listeners and U.S. record labels.Interscope reportedly paid millions to secure the band (the Hives still won’t confirm the amount) and gave them creative control. “They created a buzz on their own, a subculture,” Jimmy Iovine, then the label’s chairman, told Spin for a 2004 cover story. “I respect that. I will pay for that. I will let them drive.”The group stuck to its formula on “Tyrannosaurus Hives” from 2004 — 12 songs, less than 30 minutes — and stretched out on “The Black and White Album” three years later, which featured production from hitmakers including Pharrell Williams and Jacknife Lee. “We were probably the last rock band to have a big budget,” Almqvist quipped. “We almost owe it to rock ’n’ roll to use it,” he recalled thinking. (They went independent and self-produced “Lex Hives” in 2012.)The Hives were continually presented with unlikely opportunities, which they wholeheartedly embraced: recording a Christmas song with Cyndi Lauper, licensing “Tick Tick Boom” for a Nike commercial, taking on challenging assignments opening for both Maroon 5 and Pink in arenas across the U.S.“We have to go and find people who hadn’t heard us before. And you want to be able to turn over a crowd,” Arson said. “It’s a way of keeping your tools sharp.”Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist among an enthusiastic crowd in Sweden.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesBut new songs — at least, new songs up to Hives standards — weren’t flowing. When the pandemic hit, the band ruled out remote recording and turned to a fellow Swede: the producer Patrik Berger, whose credits include Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” and hits by Charli XCX. Berger had started out in a punk band called Snuffed by the Yakuza and is “a proper music nerd,” Arson said; the Hives trusted his judgment.“They played me some demos just to hear like, which of these, like, hundred songs do you think would fit on a record?” Berger said in a phone interview. “My role,” he explained, was “getting them in the room and start having fun with these songs again and not overthink it so much.”The result is a classic Hives album filled with boasts, powder-keg energy and punk angst. (“They say that life’s for living/But life as we know it’s a stick up,” Almqvist croons on “Stick Up.”) “Countdown to Shutdown” is built on a bouncing bass line by The Johan and Only, who replaced Destruction in 2013. “What Did I Ever Do to You?” originated on a hybrid instrument — an organ, guitar, drum machine and microphone — that Almqvist picked up on Swedish Craigslist for $400, which included the patent.The album’s title is a nod to some Hives mythology — that they are the creation of a Svengali named Randy Fitzsimmons, who writes all their songs. In truth, the band labors over every track. “They turn every stone,” Berger said, “a little bit like working a Rubik’s cube, trying to figure out how can we make this as good as possible?”The band’s absence from recording coincided with a drop-off in rock’s cultural and commercial might, a fact that provided Almqvist with an easy layup: “I’m just saying that the Hives don’t release a record for 10 years, rock becomes completely unpopular,” he said. “Coincidence? We think not.”Onstage at Racket, Almqvist assured everyone that the new songs would soon be their favorites, and presided over the controlled chaos like an exacting but lovable school master.“Everybody shut up for one second,” he ordered as the crowd clapped slightly offbeat to the breakdown of “Hate to Say I Told You So.” The room went silent. “And now,” he said, “we restart.” The audience laughed, obeyed and joyfully threw themselves in the air. More