Hippo Campus’ Announce New Album “Flood” and New Song “Paranoid” Out Now!
July 16, 2024 - By Psychic Hotline
Today, Hippo Campus officially announce the best album they have ever made. But, to arrive at this pivotal point of collective self-confidence, the group of four childhood friends first had to sigh, surrender and start all the way over. Out September 20th on Psychic Hotline, Flood is a record and a rebirth, in which the Twin Cities band relinquished five years of work to ultimately capture 13 tracks in just 10 days on the Texas border. While the revelatory sessions took place at Sonic Ranch last fall, with longtime producers Caleb Wright (Charly Bliss, Samia) and Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee), the process began what now feels like an epoch ago.
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.
Out today is endlessly propulsive new song that is “the collection of sun flares plastered against your eyelids after falling asleep outside,” says the band. “What’s left of whipping shitties in your self-conscious for too long. It’s a hard look in the unforgiving mirror and the sobering realization that not all questions have answers.”
Early into “Paranoid”, singer Jake Luppen asks the 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.
Flood is out September 20th on Psychic Hotline and available on vinyl, CD, and cassette. The limited edition vinyl color variants of Flood are highlighted below:
