There are two ways to deal with a highly publicised breakup. You can disappear quietly, work on yourself and return once everyone has stopped talking about it. Or you can make a five-track dance-pop EP involving shirtless cowboys, chair choreography, sexual provocation and a recreation of Paris Hilton’s infamous car wash commercial.
Nick Hissom has chosen the second option.
On Hot Boy Things, the UK-born American artist, also known as Hizzy, turns personal upheaval into pop spectacle. It’s loud, horny, occasionally ridiculous and entirely aware of all three qualities. More importantly, beneath the glossy production and deliberately provocative visuals sits an EP about reclaiming control over how you’re seen.
“Because hotness is a state of mind, and you deserve everything,” Hissom declares, which functions less like an explanation of the record than its mission statement.
Raised on Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and Daft Punk, Hissom draws heavily from the period when mainstream pop was expected to provide an entire universe around the music. Hot Boy Things consequently doesn’t feel interested in tasteful restraint. Booming synths, club drums and breathy vocals arrive alongside choreography, fashion, cowboys and enough sexual imagery to make subtlety feel actively unwelcome.
The title track establishes the philosophy immediately. ‘Hot Boy Things’ is less concerned with discovering whether Hissom qualifies as a “hot boy” than deciding the designation is his to claim. Dating and desire become part of a broader reinvention, with the track’s glossy synth-pop production carrying the knowingly excessive confidence of someone enjoying the opportunity to construct a new version of himself.
If ‘Hot Boy Things’ announces that freedom, ‘Sexify’ gives it sharper purpose.
Inspired by the relentless pulse of Benny Benassi’s ‘Satisfaction’, the track turns objectification back on itself. Hissom takes the sexual attention surrounding him and attempts to move from being its subject to its author. That distinction matters across the EP: sexuality isn’t simply present for provocation, but becomes something he can exaggerate, perform and control on his own terms.
Naturally, Hot Boy Things then introduces cowboys.
‘Yeehaw’ might be the clearest expression of Hissom’s description of his sound as “classy, with a little yeehaw”. Drawing on his family’s Texan roots, the track throws Western iconography into glossy electronic pop, while its accompanying visual adds mechanical bulls, desert fashion and a gender-flipped nod to Paris Hilton’s 2005 Carl’s Jr. car wash commercial.
There isn’t much point searching for understatement here. Cowboys aren’t being deconstructed through an academic exercise; they’re simply being made considerably gayer.
Yet Hot Boy Things becomes more interesting when the performance briefly drops.
‘Amazing’ swaps some of the project’s sexual bravado for dreamy, ethereal pop, allowing Hissom’s voice and songwriting to occupy the foreground. Within an EP so deliberately invested in image, its comparative softness feels surprisingly revealing. The song suggests the swagger surrounding it isn’t the absence of vulnerability but something constructed alongside it.
That makes closer ‘Dangerous (Get Locked)’ a fitting final step. Addressing the scrutiny accompanying Hissom’s attempts to establish himself publicly, the autobiographical track redirects frustration towards ambition. After an EP spent reclaiming desire and image, the final act is simply getting back to work.
Taken together, those shifts prevent Hot Boy Things from becoming five variations on the same provocation. There’s a trajectory beneath the glitter: heartbreak creates space, space becomes freedom, freedom encourages experimentation, and eventually the spectacle starts looking less like rebellion than self-definition.
The project is hardly subtle about that transformation, but subtlety would probably defeat the purpose.
Hissom understands the theatrical tradition he’s operating within. Great pop has frequently blurred authentic emotion with deliberate fabrication, turning private turmoil into choreography, costumes and fantasy. Hot Boy Things embraces that machinery enthusiastically. The breakup may be real, but there’s no reason the recovery can’t involve a mechanical bull.
At its best, Hot Boy Things feels less like a breakup record than an act of permission. Permission to be sexual without apology, ridiculous without embarrassment, vulnerable without abandoning confidence and ambitious without pretending not to care. Hissom emerges from heartbreak not with a solemn meditation on healing, but with five tracks designed to make freedom look like a very good night out.
Sometimes self-discovery happens quietly. Sometimes it happens shirtless, under club lights, with a cowboy nearby.
