Shervin Lainez
The band Hippo Campus.
Hippo Campus
Hippo Campus makes music tailored for the live experience. The vitality at the center of every track on studio recordings translates even better onstage.
In more than a decade together, the St. Paul-based quintet has earned a reputation as indie sweethearts with a loyal fanbase, even as their sound has continued to evolve.
Touring in support of their new EP, Wasteland, Hippo Campus will bring summer vibes and their dynamic live performance to The Sylvee on May 23. For lead guitarist Nathan Stocker, performing songs from Wasteland live has felt like a return to form, he tells Isthmus.
“There’s sort of a carefree energy to these songs,” Stocker says. “There’s not a lot of weight to our execution of them in a live setting, despite the lyrical content. Having that light energy, that buoyancy, is nice so far.”
Since the band’s formation in 2013, that carefree spirit has been a staple of Hippo Campus’ sound. They’ve crafted their own blend of guitar-driven feel-good summer rock marked by sprightly instrumentation and clever vocals. As the band’s sound has grown over the years, so have its five members.
High schoolers Jake Luppen (lead vocals, guitar), Nathan Stocker (lead guitar, vocals), Zach Sutton (bass, keyboard), DeCarlo Jackson (trumpet), and Whistler Isaiah Allen (drums, vocals) began performing together while attending the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists high school in 2013. Stocker credits their shared influences and a shared vision for their chemistry in the early days of performing together.
“For us, it was fueled by being friends much more than the professional or potential payoff of commercial success,” Stocker says.
With high school graduation approaching, their early work carried a sense of romanticized urgency. The band members wanted to capture their youth through music that their friends would like.
“We really just wanted to make music and play shows that people would remember and memorialize our youth,” Stocker says.
On their Bashful Creatures (2014) and South (2015) EPs, they capture that youthful energy through vibrant, upbeat tracks that landed them appearances at Lollapalooza and a spot on NPR’s list of “Favorite New Artists of 2017.”
Since then, Hippo Campus’ sound has tapped into new instrumentation, including synths on 2018’s Bambi and member DeCarlo Jackson’s impressive trumpet parts — and more mature lyrical content from Luppen on last year’s LP3.
A year after LP3’s release, Hippo Campus has returned with their new EP, Wasteland — a five-track project with country-western undertones. On standout “Yippie-Ki-Yay,” a song about an outlawed cowboy on the run, Luppen sings about moving forward through imposter syndrome.
The country-western influence is previously untrod territory for Hippo Campus. “This project is a really collaborative one and we all touched each song at a certain point,” Stocker says. They recorded Wasteland at A Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, where the band played the songs repeatedly to capture the best takes, then build on that production-wise.
“We are a live-based band and we wanted to capture the feeling of all of us playing in a room together,” Stocker says.
Though the members have grown up and each release has explored new territory, Hippo Campus still carries a youthful ambience.
“I think the biggest similarity is we’re still chasing that thing, you know?” Stocker says. “We’re still just trying to make sense of it all. And I think the essence of this band requires that.”
As Hippo Campus continues on an ambitious tour that includes an appearance at Bonnaroo, Stocker reflects that “Not everyone gets to do this job. At the level we’re at right now, it behooves us to practice gratitude on a daily basis,” Stocker says. “Grateful that we get to do it.”
