HIPPO CAMPUS – FLOOD - CD •

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UPC: 850056058520 Label: PSYCHIC HOTLINE Format: CDRelease Date: September 20, 2024In stock items ship within 48 hours The four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvousedwith longtim e collaborator Caleb Wright and producer Brad Cook atSonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas border.They gave themselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, tomake something to which they could commit at last. Less than twoweeks later, they emerged with what they’d given themselves half adecade to make—Flood, or the best album Hippo Campus has evermade.The sentiments on Flood are raw, real, and unguarded, a testamentto Hippo Campus dropping preconceptions of how they had tosound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs. Theywiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what HippoCampus or this record needed to be. Still, sophistication lurks insubtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innate shifts that a bandof longtime best friends can tap after so much time spent helping toshape one another’s musical language. Flood doesn’t need to tell youit’s important or interesting; it simply is, just by virtue of how it’swritten, built, and rendered, a map of what it’s like to feel everythingat once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift forHippo Campus, too, as they exit the traditional label system to issueLP4 via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run by peers andpals. If you’re working to let go of expectations, why not jettison themall? There’s a bravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit inevery second of LP4.Early into the endlessly propulsive “Paranoid,” where stuntedacoustic strums undergird an inescapable jangle, Luppen asks anexistential question: “Is there something waiting out there for us atthe finish line?” For the next three minutes, the band cycles with himthrough his woes, from the title’s overwhelming worry to notions ofdislocation and loneliness. (Also, is there any other refrain ever thatmanages to make the phrase “so god-damned fucking” sound socatchy and natural?) But in the final verse, with his voice breakingthrough a scrim of distortion, he stumbles upon a new credo: “Wait, Iwanna give this life all that I have in me.” That is precisely what HippoCampus have done with Flood after realizing it doesn’t take alifetime—or, well, five years—to do just that. TRACK LIST: 01 Prayer Man02 Paranoid03 Fences04 Everything At Once05 Flood06 Corduroy07 Slipping Away08 Brand New09 Tooth Fairy10 Madman11 Forget It12 Closer13 I Got Time Show more