Hardcore, bad luck and mistaken identity: Who the hell are Public Opinion?

Public Opinion isn't the easiest band to Google, admits their vocalist, who just so happens to be called Kevin Hart, which only adds to the confusion.

“When I meet people and they find out I’m in a band, I tell people I’ll send them a link,” he explains. “If you search ‘Kevin Hart Public Opinion’, you’re not going to find us any time soon!”

He’s had to start using his wife’s name when booking dinner reservations, too, as when he turns up to the restaurant in question, the staff will invariably say, ‘Oh, we thought it might be the Kevin Hart’.

“I have to say to them, ‘We’re in downtown Denver on a Tuesday, why would it be him?!”

Before relocating from Seattle to Denver five years ago – having been priced out by the city’s tech boom – and before being confused for a diminutive comedy superstar, Kevin was in hardcore bands. Most recently it was the blistering Community Gun, whose “Pure fuck you music” was a million miles away from Public Opinion, today completed by guitarist Kevin Johnson and bassist Sebastian Stanley, whose forthcoming album, The Curse Of Public Opinion, is a superb distillation of their melding of hardcore, classic punk and garage rock.

Kevin’s pivot to a more accessible sound was one that came as a side effect of his move to Denver, rather than because of it, as well as a desire to make music with a longer tail – something that didn’t burn with quite as much intensity, and therefore burned for longer.

“Making music with Public Opinion is much more cathartic than what I’ve done before,” says Kevin, as we find out more about an outfit providing the catchy but bruising soundtrack to a life continually plying you with lemons, many of which appear too rotten to make lemonade with.

“I’d like to imagine that my intuition to stew on a negative feeling as opposed to losing my mind in front of friends or bandmates is better for the people around me,” suggests Kevin. “But I’m also capable of understanding there’s a middle ground between the two that’s probably better for all involved, myself included.”

To save you a confusing web search, here's everything you need to know...

“It’s a title that felt appropriate from day zero with this band. Five years ago, we were preparing to play a show we were excited about, and had some great bands on the bill. Then my mother died suddenly, and when I went there to deal with things, I caught COVID so had to stay, so we ultimately couldn’t play the show. There’s a song on the new record, Enhancement Talent, about that time. There have been so many examples of things going wrong for the band… travelling to shows and getting caught in blizzards, that kind of stuff.”

“With the band strewn across two states, the process of creating [Public Opinion’s debut album] Painted On Smile was pretty clunky. We were playing two or three of the songs in our live set at that point, but most of the record had never been played by more than two of us at a time before we headed into the studio. This led to an experience that felt disjointed. Additionally, there were a handful of creative decisions that were allowed to see the light of the day that wouldn’t have happened now because we weren’t ready to have uncomfortable conversations or conflict over parts. Comparing that to the new record, everything on The Curse Of Public Opinion was decided on the merit of the creative idea, as opposed to letting someone’s idea make it on the final record because we’d said no to the previous three suggestions from that person.”

“There’s a song on the record called I Pay Everyone I Still Talk To, which most people don’t seem to get the meaning of. It’s about being a musician and realising that the people you speak to the most are the ones in your employment, and it’s always about music and the business of being in a band. It’s an incredibly isolating thing to think about. But the truth is there aren’t many people that I speak to regularly who aren’t musicians.”

“I’d love to be able to say we were influenced by all these really cool old garage rock bands, but the truth is we’re more influenced by the bands one step removed from them, so the bands themselves influenced by garage rock. So it would be the [book and documentary] Meet Me In The Bathroom generation of bands, like The Strokes, Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”

“A lot of the lyrics I write carry a through line of being a quiet person who harbours a lot of anger and frustration at the world without a proper outlet. At some point in my life, I’m sure I’ll find a healthy balance between not sharing a single thing and oversharing every single thought and negative feeling I have. As embarrassing as it can be, most of my time is spent at various levels of smouldering discontent with my surroundings because I spend too much of my time with the most pessimistic point of view.”

Public Opinion's album The Curse Of Public Opinion is out now via SideOneDummy.

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