HIPPO CAMPUS
FLOOD (INDIE EXCLUSIVE CLEAR GALAXY) - LP
UPC: 850056058582
Label: PSYCHIC HOTLINE
Format: LP
Release Date: September 20, 2024
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The four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvoused
with longtime collaborator Caleb Wright and producer Brad Cook at
Sonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas border.
They gave themselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, to
make something to which they could commit at last. Less than two
weeks later, they emerged with what they’d given themselves half a
decade to make—Flood, or the best album Hippo Campus has ever
made.
The sentiments on Flood are raw, real, and unguarded, a testament
to Hippo Campus dropping preconceptions of how they had to
sound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs. They
wiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what Hippo
Campus or this record needed to be. Still, sophistication lurks in
subtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innate shifts that a band
of longtime best friends can tap after so much time spent helping to
shape one another’s musical language. Flood doesn’t need to tell you
it’s important or interesting; it simply is, just by virtue of how it’s
written, built, and rendered, a map of what it’s like to feel everything
at once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift for
Hippo Campus, too, as they exit the traditional label system to issue
LP4 via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run by peers and
pals. If you’re working to let go of expectations, why not jettison them
all? There’s a bravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit in
every second of LP4.
Early into the endlessly propulsive “Paranoid,” where stunted
acoustic strums undergird an inescapable jangle, Luppen asks an
existential question: “Is there something waiting out there for us at
the finish line?” For the next three minutes, the band cycles with him
through his woes, from the title’s overwhelming worry to notions of
dislocation and loneliness. (Also, is there any other refrain ever that
manages to make the phrase “so god-damned fucking” sound so
catchy and natural?) But in the final verse, with his voice breaking
through a scrim of distortion, he stumbles upon a new credo: “Wait, I
wanna give this life all that I have in me.” That is precisely what Hippo
Campus have done with Flood after realizing it doesn’t take a
lifetime—or, well, five years—to do just that.
TRACK LIST:
01 Prayer Man
02 Paranoid
03 Fences
04 Everything At Once
05 Flood
06 Corduroy
07 Slipping Away
08 Brand New
09 Tooth Fairy
10 Madman
11 Forget It
12 Closer
13 I Got Time
