<p><span><span>- Coming five years after their debut LP <em>Choose Your Weapon</em>, it's hard to imagine the kind of pressure the two-time Grammy nominated Hiatus Kaiyote might have been feeling.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Turns out it was a trip to Brazil to work with lauded arranger <strong>Arthur Verocai</strong> that loosened the limbs of Australia's wildest musical talents. Impromptu late-night sessions in Verocai's studio inspired enough material to convert what might have been an EP into the album they're presenting this week.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>The question of whether the 'difficult 2nd album' syndrome would strike was diffused by the strategy of teasing several tracks before the full release. Anyone who heard initial offering <em>Get Sun</em> could tell: the ambitious musicality, the unrepentant maximalism, the infectious joy of sonic overload were all there in even greater splendour than before.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Second drop <em>Red Room</em> (which emerged spontaneously from one of the Verocai sessions) showed a surprisingly restrained palette, painting with fewer colours and far more space than anything HK had made since 2015's <em>Fingerprints</em>. <strong>Nai Palm</strong>'s vocal is a raw, smoky rasp, exposed out the front of the mix in a way usually reserved for her solo works; and hardly even any vocal harmonies?! Exciting in a truly unexpected way.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>Third drop <em>Chivalry is Not Dead</em> is probably the most <strong>Brainfeeder</strong>-worthy thing they've ever done. It's almost unthinkable that this is the first time we've heard prodigy-bassist <strong>Paul Bender</strong> play slap-style, and with a speed and agility that might have now-labelmate <strong>Thundercat</strong> practising his chops. Layer over a lyric about courtship and babymaking in seahorses and slugs and we're hitting new heights of maxxed-out hypercolour psychedelia. <strong>Flylo</strong> will be pleased.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>However, for an act that has a rep for using every colour of the rainbow twice at the same time, this record is mostly surprisingly relaxed, with elements given more breathing room, textures understated in preference to being overloaded. At the same time, there's more movement between styles and environments, tempos and textures within individual compositions. The real transcendent moments here, like <em>Stone Or Lavender</em> are quieter, slower, delicate, with fewer parts and more focus.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>What also stands out is the use of ambient and textural intros and outros on tracks like <em>Get Sun</em>, <em>Sparkle Tape Breakup</em> and <em>Blood and Marrow</em>, plus the ongoing embrace of interludes. Everyone in the band plays around a lot outside the band, but it could be drummer <strong>Perrin Moss</strong>' solo output as <strong>Clever Austin</strong> (leaning more into ambient and soundscape recently) that's showing through here. It's a cool innovation on the single format: not just a way of jamming two compositions into the one place, but a way of giving the band a chance to show where they can make us land, even after we think we've worked out what a given tune has to say, what it's vocabulary is. They can still take the listener by the hand and lead them away into a totally new place, into a world they weren't expecting.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>If part of the joy of music is creating expectations only to subvert them, to create surprise, laughter, a pleasing dislocation and unfamiliarity, then <em>Mood Valiant</em> shows Hiatus Kaiyote are operating on a meta-level beyond their peers, deploying this dynamic over both the individual song and the slate of releases. So yeah, huge expectations for this one, created by a body of world-beating work that came before. Hiatus Kaiyote have managed to both subvert and exceed, dislocate and surprise, keeping their place at the pinnacle of the musical landscape.</span></span></p>
<p><span><span>- Kieran Ruffles.</span></span></p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3753900468/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="https://hiatuskaiyote.bandcamp.com/album/mood-valiant">Mood Valiant by Hiatus Kaiyote</a></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/p46Tm9-7i7E" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>