Further Reading
28th June 2024
A triumphantly wacky return from Hiatus Kaiyote, a young British trumpeter explores his faith, one of Cannonball Adderley's last romps, a big band tribute honours Chick Corea, Randy Brecker stars on a long-lost recording from a New York veteran and a Korean jazz orchestrator reflects on her cultural heritage...
Melbourne-based band Hiatus Kaiyote announces their forthcoming album Love Heart Cheat Code due June 28th via Brainfeeder Records / Ninja Tune. Alongside the announcement, the band shares their new single out “Make Friends,” the second offering from their upcoming project following their previously-released single “Everything’s Beautiful.” The band are also sharing a visual announcement of the album revealing the playful 3-D world of a family supermarket that the band have created to accompany the music.
A final unscripted addition to the album, “Make Friends” was inspired by words of wisdom imparted to the band by a friend who noted, “You don’t make friends, you recognize them.” Succinct yet profound, this sage insight reminded Nai of the lack of representation for deep, platonic love. “I wanted to have representation for just the different examples of people that I love from the women in my life, to the men, to my non-binary friends,” she shares, “and it was very natural and fun to work on as a formula.” The single is composed of one verse, but Nai takes that one verse through three gender permutations: female, male, and nonbinary. Nai adds, “When I sang the third verse, the ‘them/they’ verse, I actually had to stop. Just realizing that inclusivity is so often denied to some of the people that I love the most, my best besties.”
Love Heart Cheat Code is a snapshot of four musicians dancing together on the edge, 11 playful, exuberant tracks that shine light. Yet, for a band that made a name for itself with its complexity and received critical praise and multiple Grammy nominations for their embrace of maximalism, one of the most striking things about Love Heart Cheat Code is its simplicity. “I’m a maximalist. I complicate fucking everything,” Nai laughs. “But the more you go through things in life, you become more relaxed and uninhibited. Sometimes you can still have depth and reach people and really stop dancing around the fact: What do you want to communicate to people? And I feel like this album is a result of that clarity for us. We didn’t need to spell out complexity if the song didn’t call for it.”
On the forthcoming album, the band’s direction is not always attained directly; less deliberate, and more via deliberation and drift: in jam sessions that last late into the night and early mornings; in meals shared; in messing around with equipment and with each other. The album also features other Melbourne-based musicians like Taylor “Chip” Crawford, who played an instrument of his own invention called the frello; guitarist Tom Martin; and flautist Nikodimos; and the unprecedented addition of a very important creative force: Mario Caldato, whose work with the Beastie Boys and Seu Jorge is the stuff of legends.
Hiatus Kaiyote have always spoken about their albums as microcosms, a complete ecosystem. On Love Heart Cheat Code the band envisioned a strong visual world to coincide with the music and they worked with Sri Lanken born, Toronto based multimedia artist Rajni Perera using one of her paintings as the artwork for the album. Illustrator Chloe Biocca and Grey Ghost then collaborated with the band to create visual symbols and associated artifacts for each of the tracks on the project that pair alongside Rajni’s painting. The artifacts morphed into real products, custom jewelry, edible goods, ranging from the inspired to the haunted and utterly random. Eventually this led the band to conceive of an entirely imagined place, a Love Heart Cheat Code supermarket. The band; its employees who create these products, market them, stack the shelves, clean the aisles. In the banality of creating art into ‘product’ for the modern world the band find solace in each item and song as they are packed with transcendent and resplendent musical magic.
Throughout the album, Hiatus Kaiyote emphasizes sensing rather than knowing, a type of trust that can only be brought through creative harmony and hours of studio sessions. The result is a wide-eyed, cohesive, yet relaxed body of work that reflects a deeper understanding of themselves and the music they wish to share with the world around them.
