^{Credit: Hazbin Hotel (Amazon Prime Video)}

Sam Haft and Andrew Underberg are the musical duo behind Hazbin Hotel, which released its second season late last year on Amazon Prime Video. Cartoon Contender recently spoke with the songwriters about how the second season differed from the first, if we’ll ever see a Hazbin Hotel stage production, and which tune they’ll be submitting for Emmy consideration this year.

Q: How did the songwriting process for Season 2 of Hazbin Hotel differ from the first season?

SH: One way in which it was very different was that in Season 2, we were more participatory in the general breaking of the story for the season. We participated in something called the Story Summit, which was when Vivienne and the whole writing team got together with us, and a couple of the producers, and just kind of talked about the plot of the season, how it would unfold episode to episode, and for our contribution, where the songs would go, and how those songs might be creative directed.

AU: And we also knew who would be playing the characters because everyone, or most people were cast, which was not the case for Season 1… We were writing pretty much all the songs, without knowing who we're gonna be singing.

SH: And even when we did know people, we had never worked with them before. So we didn't really have a sense of them and their personal style.

Q: When writing a song for Hazbin Hotel, how closely do you collaborate with creator Vivienne Medrano and the rest of the writing team?

SH: With Vivienne specifically, extremely closely. I would say, generally, the rest of the writing team's feedback when we do get it is always filtered through Vivienne anyway. Like, she really is the point person.

AU: So long as she likes it, then it then we're good.

SH: Yeah, we like to say that we're writing for an audience of one.

Q: The Primetime Emmys are on the horizon. Have you decided which song from Season 2 you’ll be submitting for Emmy consideration?

Absolutely, it's “Love in a Bottle,” sung by the incredible Keith David, who's having quite a year. He's getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame two days from now.

Q: How did you guys come to the conclusion to submit that song when you have so many great ones to choose from?

AU: Keith's performance on it was a big part of that determination.

SH: I do really feel like this is his year, and I feel like something…

AU: We want to piggyback off of! Ride his coattails to a nomination. Well, we'll see.

SH: He's so passionate about the project, he puts so much of himself in every song he does on the show... He cares so much about the show, and the soundtrack, and his performance on it that with so many really great contenders for what could have been the song, it made so much sense to choose his.

AU: And also, now I'm thinking about it, yeah, it is one of the better sort of performing songs in terms of streams… sometimes it's a surprise to us which songs resonate.

SH: That's true. And it also can exist outside the vacuum of the show. If you watch the song, having never seen the show, you can still understand, like, here's a character going through this sort of addiction relapse. You see them go through the mania, and then hit the lows of the depression at the end. You don't need a lot of context to understand and enjoy the song.

AU: There was one song we probably would have needed a gun to our head to submit, which would have been “Speedrun To Redemption,” which is kind of the opposite, where if you don't understand the context of the show…

SH: You have no idea what's happening! … It is so reliant on knowing who these characters are, and then what they're playing, and it's deeply in the show in a way that “Love in a Bottle” is kind of this stand-alone emotional character moment.

Q: What was the process behind writing that song?

SH: On that episode, we knew that we were gonna have a solo Angel Dust song (“Losin' Streak”), and we knew that we were gonna have a solo Husk song, and that those songs would kind of be like foils to each other in certain ways. We started on both of those songs, I would say, pretty simultaneously. At first, “Losin' Streak” had a lot more, sort of alcohol-y language in it. As we figured out what “Love in a Bottle” was going to be, we sort of stripped a lot of the booze talk out of “Losin' Streak” and made “Losin' Streak” very specifically about gambling and desire. “Love in a Bottle,” which started, I would say, maybe even a little bit more gambl-y than it ended up, that pivoted less gambl-y, more alcohol-y. One thing that's very interesting that we talked about the other day was that “Love in a Bottle” really started out with drums, and that has never happened on any other song I've heard before.

AU: We haven't done that before. Yeah, just so the jazzy, swung drum pattern that then… I think we sort of scattered over.

SH: Yeah, pretty much. And that, I think part of it was, like, that the drum evoked the mood of this sort of manic binge that Husk was going through… It was all just built on this idea of the manic heartbeat of drink, drink, drink, drink, drink. 

Q: And it's interesting because for the first season, you guys submitted “Loser, Baby,” which was also a Keith David song or a Keith David duet. I was disappointed that didn't get nominated for an Emmy…

SH: You and me both!

Q: I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the music peer group gets it right this year. Why do you think that “Loser, Baby” became such a breakout hit for the show?

AU: I feel like it is the song that… represents what the show is, in that it is sort of heartfelt, but also crass, and has sort of a fun interaction between two characters. So, you get a sense of the dynamic, the sort of interpersonal dynamics.

SH: And in many ways, is also, as the show is, a song about redemption and about finding found family at your lowest, which I really think is so core to what is meaningful about this show, to the fans of the show, is this idea of finding community when you feel marginalized or traumatized, or that there's stuff that you're processing and healing from.

Q: You also recently got nominated for an American Music Award. Although Sam attended, you mentioned in another interview that there wasn’t a lot of pressure to win with KPop Demon Hunters in the category. Demon Hunters ultimately won, but if Hazbin Hotel had come out on top, do you have any idea what you would’ve said?

SH: I would have said, “I did not write a speech because I expected to lose to KPop Demon Hunters.”

AU: Yeah, I can't imagine a year where a win for Hazbin would be less expected.

SH: Yeah, we were the demons they were hunting!

AU: I feel like it's rare that a soundtrack takes over the world in a way that KPop Demon Hunter did.

SH: Last year, Arcane won, but, like, we did actually prepare a speech. We prepared a speech last year. It seemed possible. This year, Andrew was like, “I'm not going.”

AU: That is true.

Q: With every season of Hazbin Hotel, is there a particular character that you go in with a song in mind for?

SH: In Season 2, that was “Gravity,” for sure. We came into Season 2 at the beginning of those Zooms that I mentioned, where we were like, “Where's Lute's villain song?” Lute needs to swear revenge for what just happened to her.

AU: Jessica needs to sing a whole song…

SH: Truly, so much of it was motivated by the strength of Jessica Vosk.

Q: If I’m not mistaken, “Hellfire” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame was an inspiration while writing “Gravity.” In the back of your heads, did you always know that Hazbin Hotel had to pay homage to “Hellfire” at some point? It’s such a natural fit.

AU: I guess somewhere deep within us, we must have known.

SH: It makes a lot of sense in terms of just the subject matter, especially because the villains in Hazbin change and evolve over time, who those villains are, but the sort of world villains at the beginning of the series are the forces of heaven. So, this idea of violent dogma being this antithesis of soft-hearted, empathetic redemption that Charlie has to deliver. It felt like an inevitability that we would have a song like this.

Q: Any chance that we're going to see Hazbin live in the foreseeable future?

SH: Yes, I would say for sure, but… foreseeable… it depends on your definition of “foreseeable.”

AU: I foresee a residency in Vegas in 15 years.

SH: It’s the kind of thing that Viv would want to do, and she said she would want to do it, but she's a showrunner on I think three or four shows that people know about, and a couple ones that people don't. She's got a very full work life. She cares about Broadway more than basically anyone on Earth. So, it's the kind of thing where if she were to really want to set to work on a Hellaverse Broadway show with its own story and songs and stuff, she would want to give it her full focus… It's something that she's interested in, but I couldn't possibly give you a timeline and be like, yes, we're doing it, it's gonna be soon.

Q: The good thing is that we're going to still have plenty of Hazbin Hotel to hold us over until we inevitably get that show because it's not only going to return for Season 3, but it's also renewed for Seasons 4 and 5, if I'm not mistaken. Do you guys have any songs written for those upcoming seasons yet?

SH: Three, done! Four, done! Five, not started! Well, Five, we only just got renewed.

Q: Can you give me a preview of any of them?

SH: Definitely not! When we signed a contract, Jeff Bezos put these little bombs in the base of our skulls. He's right off-camera over there, and his finger’s over the button!

Q: When you write a song, do you visualize what it's going to look like within the show?

SH: It really depends on the song.

AU: For instance, both songs about Heaven, “Welcome to Heaven” and “Like You,” we, in the lyrics, call out very specific items, objects, animals, et cetera, that then need to be represented visually.

SH: Yes, and then we get yelled at. Because they're like, “Why are we drawing so many pangolins? Why did you say unicorn polo?”… In “Happy Day in Hell,” we specifically write out, “Charlie sees two people having sex.” There were little visual gags in there that we wrote out. In fact, in “Like You,” not only in the lyrics do we call out, like, here are some things that we're seeing in heaven... Nicole Rodriguez, who did the boards for that, I sent her a picture from a Star Wars comic of Jar-Jar Binks' father holding a gun to his head… I was like, “Do you get this idea of Pentious is in total misery, and then it's a confetti gun?” So, that was a very specific pitch.

Q: When writing a musical, there are usually songs that don't make the cut for one reason or another. Are there any in particular from Hazbin Hotel that have been cut but you think might resurface in the future?

SH: Yes, but because of that, we couldn't tell you about them and what they are. But very much, the answer to that is yes. Certainly, when the song comes out, we'll be like, actually, this was written then! But we can't yet. Jeff has got his fingers on the button.

AU: He's ready to push. It's got an itchy thumb.

Q: Hazbin Hotel, of course, started on YouTube before making the leap to Prime Video. Fittingly enough, Goosework, who worked on the Hazbin Hotel pilot, has the Last Act of Digital Circus hitting theaters this week. How do you think the YouTube pipeline is changing the game for artists?

SH: Not only has YouTube sort of changed the landscape for film and television. You look at Obsession and Backrooms right now, both made by filmmakers who cut their teeth on YouTube. Especially in the indie horror world, you have Talk to Me by the Philippou brothers, also from YouTube. YouTube is a great environment for fostering emerging creatives who really can create their own worlds that people are playing in and building fandoms in. Vivienne is a perfect example of that. I also think creating for YouTube has changed dramatically over the last several years. The competition, the level of saturation that's in YouTube is enormous. People are not being served the stuff they're following by default on YouTube. It was a tremendous change on YouTube when all of a sudden, the people you are subscribed to were not your feed anymore. Now you had an algorithmically curated feed, and if you wanted to see the people you were subscribed to, you had to click a bell on their profile so that you would get alerts to it.

I think largely, YouTube has suffered the same change that has happened to a lot of platforms. You know, really kind of baked into TikTok, Twitter, etc., where it's no longer about who you have chosen to follow. It is more about who the platform is putting in front of you. But I do think that hyper-competitiveness has also led to a race to creating extremely sticky, memorable, hooky content, which the Digital Circus is in a huge way. A very big part of its popularity is the fact that not only did it catch on algorithmically. When the algorithm really hits, that's how you get a level of hit that normally you wouldn't get in the age of a subscriber, because in the age of subscribers, you're a hit with your followers. But when you get an algorithmic hit, you're a hit everywhere. MrBeast was putting Digital Circus characters in videos. They were being used in AI slop accounts, making stuff for children who were not old enough to watch the Digital Circus. There were five-year-olds buying Jax's Plush Toys at the mall, and mall bootleggers making Jax’s plush toys in part because when something really hits in the algorithm, now it's hitting to people who weren't initially following it, and it's kind of breaking into mainstream in an interesting way.

Q: When do you think we might see Hazbin Hotel Season 4? And if you can't answer that, what else do you have on the pipeline that we might see soon?

SH: We don't know the answer to Season 3's drop date.

AU: 2026, I think?

SH: I don't think this year… Towards the end of the year, um, we will have the new season of Helluva Boss coming out -  the first half of the season, and then the second half shortly thereafter. Then, presumably, Season 3 coming after that. In terms of other things we have on the pipeline, Andrew and I are just about to commence writing a stage musical together.

taking accountability: https://t.co/UO4ci5H6TF pic.twitter.com/5BpgwMoEA8

— Sam Haft 🍉 (@SamHaft) June 4, 2026

Q: Can you tell me anything about that, or is that also under wraps?

AU: May 17, 2027, the Palladium in Times Square. We've got the theater.

SH: We've booked the theater. We just have not written the show. I don't know if you're based in New York. We booked a theater in Times Square to premiere a new musical, and now we just have to spend the next year writing it.

Me: I'm on the other side of the country, but now I know what date to mark so I can fly across.

Nick Spake is the Author of Bright & Shiny: A History of Animation at Award Shows Volumes 1, 2, and 3. Available Now!