BY: AMEILA KRIGELSKI/ STAFF WRITER
This past September, Minnesota-based indie rock group Hippo Campus released their fourth studio album, Flood. Dropping over a year since their last EP Wasteland, the album has been described by fans as their “most mature project yet.”
Known for their upbeat and experimental approaches, Flood houses their most cohesive and stripped-down sound to date. The album with country-inspired undertones is a new direction for the band, however, there are noticeable aspects of previous projects sprinkled throughout.
In an interview with local Minnesota public radio station The Current, lead singer Jake Luppen describes that the band has “gotten more internal” with their writing, as opposed to “confronting big ideas” that they knew minimally about in their early days.
Bassist Zach Sutton has called to the same ideas as the band exits their twenties and is ready to grow. The group also sparked a change with this album by switching labels, which are now operating under Psychic Hotline.
Hippo Campus first debuted the new direction of their craft in April with their single Everything At Once, which guitarist Nathan Stocker describes as “a reckoning… where things were getting more and more serious on a mortal level.”
The next single, Tooth Fairy, revisits a similar style to their 2022 album LP3, featuring heavy autotune on Luppen’s vocals.
Paranoid and Forget It were the last two singles prior to the album release, and are arguably the most upbeat tracks on the record. However, each contains lyrics with more serious underlying messages:
“Everything and everyone’s out to get me / Nobody is helping and nobody should let me be / Paranoid.”
Right off the bat, fans were quick to acknowledge the powerful percussion from Whistler Allen on the first track Prayer Man. Previous releases from the band begin with a softer song to transition the rest of the album, from Sun Veins on their debut album Landmark, to 2 Young 2 Die on LP3 more recently.
While the original singles established a new direction, so did the first track in a sense of tradition, similar to when British alternative rock band The 1975 did away with “Go down / Soft sound”, a staple lyric to begin all of their albums from 2012 up until 2020.
Incorporating the use of a harmonica is a first for Hippo, heard on the track Corduroy. The Western tones are heavy, perhaps inspired when recording the album at Sonic Ranch Studios in Texas. “Love the harmonica!” a fan even shouted to Stocker at their sold-out Bowery Ballroom show in New York a few days after the album’s release.
As a cohesive album, many of the songs seem to blend together. Fences and Flood are somber songs that follow the themes of growing older, doubt, and searching for who you are.
Madman has been established as a fan favorite in online forums such as Reddit, occasionally called the “riskiest” track on the album. It’s a fun and different tune compared to the slower and intricate themes that the record follows throughout.
The final couple of tracks Closer and I Got Time perfectly encapsulate what the band is trying to convey throughout the listening experience:
“Why should I get hung up on anything? / Because I got time / Going nowhere but I got all night / Not gonna miss it when it hits just right / Gonna make it go slow,”
Luppen laments on the final track as a reflection of how much life and time we really have to live with the lyrics:
“What’s the rush? / If this is as good as it gets I’ll be more than fine / Because I got time”
In a way, fans have considered Closer to be an older version of Buttercup, the final track on Landmark.
“Every now and then I get a glimpse of who you were / Tortured and delusional just sticking to your guns” has been associated with Buttercup’s iconic chant, “I’ll be fine, I’m alright, it’s my body / Gonna stick to my guns like you taught me.”
Flood is all about getting older and maybe a letter to the band’s younger and also future selves. What a sweet callback it would be to finally kiss these golden years goodbye.
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