Liquid Mike

A postal round on Lake Superior

Marquette sits on the south shore of Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a long drive from any label office. Liquid Mike started there in 2020, although Mike Maple and Monica Nelson had been making music together since 2016 before moving to the town and recruiting drummer Cody Marecek. Zack Alworden plays bass. Guitarist Dave Daignault joined in 2023 and turned the band into a five-piece, with Nelson on synthesiser and backing vocals.

Maple writes nearly everything, and for years he did it around a day job with the United States Postal Service, working as a rover who covered other carriers' routes on foot. The job fed the songs. The lyrics of the first five albums drew on what he noticed walking the town, and the current set still includes a song called USPS.

The output was relentless. Stuntman and You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth both appeared in 2021, A Beer Can and a Bouquet followed in 2022, and a self-titled record arrived in 2023 with eleven songs in eighteen minutes. The recording set-up was an eight-track and not much else. Daignault told Stereogum in October 2023 that they might as well have been recording with plungers. The band named Guided By Voices, Superdrag, Jeff Rosenstock, PUP and Weezer as touchstones in that interview, and critics have reached for Everclear, Green Day and Weezer to describe the sound: fast tempos, loud guitars, big melodies, and a rule that nothing runs past three minutes.

The morning the Bandcamp money arrived

The turn came in April 2023, when Keegan Bradford of the band Camp Trash posted the self-titled album on Twitter. Maple later described waking up to find about 150 dollars in his Bandcamp account and wondering what had happened. By October 2023 Stereogum had made the group a Band To Watch, and the self-titled album was being written up as the record where a home-recording project became a band.

Paul Bunyan's Slingshot followed in February 2024, with a deluxe edition in September of that year. It drew praise from Consequence, Paste and Rolling Stone, and it took the band out of Marquette for proper touring, including dates supporting The Wonder Years and The Menzingers. Booking now runs through Ground Control Touring, the agency that handles a large slice of American independent guitar music.

Hell Is an Airport

The sixth album was trailed for a year. Crop Circles came out as a single in September 2024. In May 2025 the band announced the record alongside two more singles, Selling Swords and Groucho Marx, then released AT&T in June and Claws in July, the latter with a video built around a dog show.

Hell Is an Airport was released on 12 September 2025 through AWAL. Maple produced it, and the whole thing was recorded, mixed and mastered at his home studio between 2024 and 2025. Most of it was finished well ahead of release; AT&T was the late addition, cut in January and February 2025. Fourteen tracks run to twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds, which for this band counts as expansive. The closing run of titles, from a song called Liam Gallagher into the title track, gives a fair idea of the register.

The reviews were the strongest of the band's career. Pitchfork gave it 7.2, The Line of Best Fit 8 out of 10, Stereogum made it Album of the Week, and The Alternative named it the best album of 2025.

Behind the record was a decision. Matter News reported on 31 October 2025 that Maple had left the postal service to tour more, filling the gaps with substitute teaching and handyman work, and that the songs were written at a crossroads: music full-time or the USPS, buying a house or renting, staying in Marquette or moving somewhere with more opportunity. Lit From the Wrong End is about a sledding accident and getting older. Asked how six albums had come in five years, Maple said he had simply been hungry, working every day and wanting to make something good. The night after that piece ran, on 1 November 2025, the band opened for Militarie Gun at a sold-out Dirty Dungarees in Columbus, Ohio.

September 2026: the Drug Church tour

As of early September 2026 Songkick lists twenty-five upcoming shows across six countries. The immediate business is Drug Church's autumn headline tour of the United Kingdom and Europe. On the British leg the bill is a three-band affair with Downward also supporting; the run opens at Torquay's Burn It Down Festival and takes in Gorilla in Manchester and the Electric Ballroom in London. Songkick also has the band at Liverpool's No Play Festival on 5 September and at Slay in Glasgow on 8 September.

From there the tour crosses to the continent with Liquid Mike as the sole support: Logo in Hamburg on 14 September, the FRANNZ Club in Berlin on the 15th, Klub 2progi in Poznań on the 16th, Strom in Munich on the 18th, Exil in Zürich on the 20th, Das Bett in Frankfurt on the 22nd, Luxor in Cologne on the 23rd and Glaz'art in Paris on the 24th.

Then they go home and headline. The November run starts at the A&R Music Bar in Columbus on 3 November and heads west through Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City's Kilby Court, Boise, Seattle's Vera Project and Portland, before a California stretch that peaks at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles on 15 November. Mesa, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Oklahoma City follow, and the tour closes at Off Broadway in St Louis on 24 November. Neither Songkick nor the agency page names support acts for those dates yet.

What the show is like

The best public record of a current set is the hometown show at Blackrocks in Marquette on 16 October 2025, a month after the album came out. Users on setlist.fm logged twenty songs, with the caveat that the list is incomplete and out of order. The new record supplies the spine: '99, Lit From the Wrong End, AT&T, Claws, Instantly Wasted and Crop Circles all appear. Around them sit older favourites like Drinking and Driving, Holding in a Cough, Mouse Trap, K2, American Record, Town Ease and USPS, and the night ended with a cover of A Salty Salute by Guided by Voices, the band's most openly acknowledged influence.

Twenty songs sounds like a marathon; with this catalogue it is not. Most of the material sits between one and three minutes, so a headline set moves at a clip and rarely pauses. On the European dates the band play a support slot, which means a shorter version of the same thing before Drug Church. There is no production to speak of in any published account: five people, guitars, a synth and the songs. The Columbus show in November 2025 sold out a basement-sized venue, and the November 2026 run has graduated to rooms like the Teragram Ballroom, which is about as clear a measure of the year as any review score.