Hippo Campus, Jelani Aryeh

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Brit O’Brien

Hippo Campus

$27.50

media release: Hippo Campus' third studio album, titled LP3, is out now via Grand Jury Music. The fourth single is "Bang Bang." The cascading, silvery track poetically compares the lust-over-logic struggle of a long distance relationship to the bleakness of winter, featuring a crystalline synth line and driving, burnished guitar riffs. It’s accompanied by a trippy animated clip directed by multimedia artist Lachlan Turczan (Phoebe Bridgers, Blake Mills, Flock of Dimes).

“Bang Bang” follows the band’s charismatic late-night debut performing the “anthemic” (BB) “Ride or Die” on The Late Late Show with James Corden, which Corden deemed “brilliant.” “Ride Or Die” has already amassed 1.5 million streams across DSPs and follows successful singles “Semi Pro” and “Boys.”

WATCH THE “BANG BANG” VIDEO HERE

On the track, Luppen says,“I was in a long-distance relationship for a long time and I knew that it wasn't working. But instead of us talking about it, we ignored it. It was a situation where our attraction to each other caused us to neglect all the very logical issues that were at hand.”

In explaining his vision for the video, Turczan says, "The goal for this project was to create an abstract visual language that synchronized with the energy of this song. My inspiration pulls heavily from the pioneers of visual music in animation, namely artists like Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye. It was also a nice challenge to incorporate the feel of the album artwork into this piece so that everything exists as a ben-day halftone pattern on newsprint." 

What Hippo Campus wanted with LP3 was something all five of them could agree on, the way they’d made music in the early days of the band when they were in high school. As their profile grew, amassing nearly ¾ of a billion streams, they found themselves compromising on their visions, thinking about how fans would interact with their music, and plagued by an unsustainable industry ecosystem.

LP3 is their strongest and most complete work yet -- a freshly-inked portrait excavating young adulthood and identity and, more importantly, how that personal identity fits into a larger camaraderie. It looks at how growing up can just feel like something that’s always moving past you when you’re trying to grab a hold of it; it’s a push-and-pull of letting go or holding tighter -- and figuring out what matters the most. Through cinematic, sonic clarity, is a sweeping account of courage and tenacity; tender-hearted stumbling that leads you on the right path after all.