“Hot Wax” is a simple piece of psychedelic garage rock with strange production and a distinct rhythm section. The lyrics are repetitive and establish a strange fascination of Stu’s with sludgy engulfing liquids.
In the liner notes of the 2018 reissue of Oddments, Stu described “Hot Wax” as “a home recording Ambrose and I made.” The rattling, metallic sound heard throughout the track is a spring reverb guitar pedal being hit by Stu. “I do have one of those big yellow Danelectro Spring King pedals, which can be pretty cool as a studio tool. That’s that sound on ‘Hot Wax’ that keeps coming in, I was just punching one of those.” The song features lyrics lifted from The Beach Boys’ 1962 song “Surfin’ Safari” during its choruses. It was released on March 7th, 2014 and later referenced by the band a handful of times, often for new vinyl pressings. For the 2018 reissue of Oddments, the song was used in promotional videos. A tweet showing off the Australian vinyl pressings of K.G. features the phrase with emojis of a pair of eyes, a candle and fire. In Gizz with the program, while the band spectates the pressing of Butterfly 3000, Cavs brings up the song with Ambrose mimicking the rhythm afterwards.
A music video for the song was released on May 30th, 2014 on NME’s YouTube channel. Created by Jason Galea, it shows Stu, Joey and Cavs playing the song with 2D animation depicting different elements of the Oddments album cover and surreal video effects. In a 2016 interview Galea stated that the video was edited in After Effects with animation done frame by frame in Photoshop. The song was nominated for Music Video of the Year at the 2014 J Awards and would be referenced by Galea in the future, such as on the poster for 2019-08-20.
Its first reported live performance was on 2014-03-26 at The Old Bar in Naarm (Melbourne) and would be played throughout 2014. These versions are more chaotic than the studio version with a noticeably faster pace, a sped up ending, a different key and Stu singing through a filter which lowers his voice. The song continued to make appearances throughout 2015 and 2016 with no notable differences from the 2014 rendition. After an appearance at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn on 2016-05-14, “Hot Wax” seemed to disappear from sets apart from an appearance in the band’s documentary BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL. The song reappeared briefly on 2018-06-20 at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta coming out of “Digital Black” — this time without the voice changer. It was brought back to the stage on 2022-03-05 as part of the Return of the Curse of Timeland festival. From here “Hot Wax” entered the band’s rotation again as a semi-rare track with a few performances in 2022 and 2023.