Today Samia shares a set of covers arriving just in time for Valentine’s Day: “Desperado” by the Eagles, which remains true to the piano ballad structure of the original, reclaimed and anchored by Samia’s formidable, expressive voice, along with two versions of “Born on a Train” by Magnetic Fields, one crescendoing mid-tempo rendition with acoustic guitars and backing vocals, and a jittery, fast-paced, aptly titled “Anxiety Version.”

Samia shares: “These two songs feel like a conversation; they’re almost two totally opposite perspectives. I definitely relate more to the sentiment of ‘Desperado’ but wanted to give a voice to both sides. ‘Born on a Train’ is one of my favorite songs ever and my friend Ned soundchecks with it every night on our tour so we always end up singing it together. Two other members of my band, Sam and Boone, played on the tracks and Caleb’s production is so honest and intimate; these songs feel special because I worked on them with my friends!!”

The release of these covers falls amidst a lengthy headline tour (dubbed the “Loving U Thanking U Tour”) which kicked off in late January, including SOLD-OUT dates in Boston, Burlington, DC, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, LA, Cleveland, Madison, and more. In addition to the current run of shows, you may have heard: Samia is scheduled to appear at this year’s Governor’s Ball! Tickets for the remaining dates available in our tour section.

Today Jordana returns with details on her debut studio album, Face The Wall. It comes on the heels of 2020’s collaborative TV Girl EP, which itself followed her twin EPs Something To Say & To You, and her bedroom pop introduction Classical Notions of Happiness. Produced by Cameron Hale (Claud, Khalid), and mixed by Miro Mackie (Wallows, St Vincent, The Neighborhood), it’s a ten-song collection of indie rock romps, pop punk freak outs, & understated balladry. It reminds us of The Cure & That Dog & Warped Tour 2006 & Ashlee Simpson & The Strokes & makes us feel exactly the way we felt when we first heard each of those things.

To celebrate the announcement, Jordana has released a single & music video for the track “Catch My Drift.” It’s a six-string sugar high that practically demands the  carefree studio video shot by Tess Lafia. In it, there are four Jordana’s, each manning an instrument: the suspiciously five o’clock shadowed Jordan on drums, the moody Dana on bass, the vest-obsessed only child Jo on guitar, and an Envy Adams-adoring frontwoman in Jordy.

The album will be available digitally and on LP, CD & limited edition cassette. You can get a white & purple swirl version of the 12″ exclusively on Bandcamp, a pink & green swirl version at Vinyl Me Please (live tomorrow, February 9th with their next store drop), and a clear version at your local record shop. Links to pre-order each version are below.

In other news, Jordana will hit the road later this year. First she opens up a run for Wallows in May, before embarking on a headline run with Harry Teardrop in June. Dates listed below. Tickets in our tour section on Friday.

More soon!

LP3 arrives today, and to put it plainly: it’s just the best thing Hippo Campus has ever done.

The album was heralded earlier this week by one last teaser from the album. “Bang Bang” has been a fan-favorite since the band started playing it during streams in 2020. Listen to it and it’s obvious why.

On the track, Hippo’s Jake 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.” 

“Bang Bang” follows the band’s charismatic late-night rendition of “Ride or Die” on The Late Late Show with James Corden, which Corden deemed “brilliant.” Check it out below. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlhXEpZnbDg

Yesterday, Hippo Campus released their new single, “Ride or Die,” along with its looping Joe Pease-directed music video. To celebrate the release the band also surprise-delivered free flexi discs to their friends at indie record shops. That’s right, 1,000 limited edition flexi discs featuring the single have been scattered all over the globe at record stores in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand & Japan. They’re free and available while supplies last.

(UPDATE 7PM JAN 10TH: SHIPPING DELAY: Some packages of free ‘Ride or Die’ flexi discs meant to arrive by this morning have run into shipping issues in the US & New Zealand. Several retailers are still waiting on their copies, but all are in transit. We are so sorry for the inconvenience!)

Today, Hippo Campus announce the release of their third studio album, LP3, coming Feb 4 2022. It’s accompanied by the enthralling lead single “Boys,” a song about the romantic nature of memorializing one’s own ephemerality. And hangovers. The announcement follows August’s Good Dog, Bad Dream EP – a five-track live wire of indie pop tinged with confessions of dark humor. If GD,BD heralded a moment of madcap experimentation, LP3 is where the band synthesize that energy into a sound they’ve been working to perfect since 2015, making way for a brand new era of their music.

Of the first LP3 single, lead singer and guitarist Jake Luppen says, “To me, ‘Boys’ is bottoming out, sort of reaching your lowest point mentally. And because you’re there, you assess everything around you, and then become a better person…It’s like that feeling when you’re drunk and then you wake up hungover and you hate yourself.” The video was shot, directed and edited by the band’s own Whistler Isaiah, and features a a revolving direct-to-camera montage of one night’s exploits.

LP3 will arrive in several limited edition pressings of vinyl, and on CD & cassette. Artwork was handled by the band’s longtime visual collaborator David Kramer and Eliot Larson. The webstore & Bandcamp exclusive version is pressed on 180g Translucent Purple Swirl vinyl, featuring deluxe edition artwork, wide spine jacket on uncoated stock with a die-cut center hole, revealing the vinyl labels from the outside of the package. It includes a 36×24 fold-out poster. All packaged in a poly bag. Additional limited edition color variants are available at your local record shop, Rough Trade (both US & UK!), Minneapolis retailers like Electric Fetus & Down in the Valley, and Vinyl Me Please (whose pre-order will launch tomorrow!).

The band also just announced their first International Tour Dates since 2019, hitting Glasgow, Manchester, London, Antwerp, Cologne and Amsterdam the week of the album’s release. They’ll be on sale Friday. Check all their dates, including the massive US tour announced earlier this year, over on their artist page.

To celebrate the launch of their entirely sold-out US tour, Jordana and LA-based TV Girl have surprise-released a collaborative EP entitled Summer’s Over. Across its seven songs, the pair mesh TV Girl’s hypnotic, sample-heavy production aesthetic with Jordana’s plaintive-yet-playful vocal to form the perfect ode to the turning of the seasons, and the perfect celebration of their epic trek across America. Tour dates HERE. 

True Love is the perfect title for the latest album from Hovvdy, available everywhere today.

It’s a record filled with hope, radiating the kind of warmth you feel when the sun peeks out from behind the early October clouds. It’s a distillate of so many emotions. Simple and pure. With the support of Andrew Sarlo, who co-produced, the duo of Charlie Martin & Will Taylor has expanded their once-bedroom-sized vision to near-panoramic proportions. You will love this record, and it will love you back.

Earlier this week the band shared, “Blindsided,” a perfect encapsulation of what makes the band and album so great. It also contains the incredibly evocative line “cold Bud in a Solo cup” which makes us already miss summer and the south and summer in the south. The music video above was directed by Hayden Hubner.

In other news, while they’re currently trekking across the US with fellow Austinite Dayglow (tickets for the handful of not sold out shows in the tour section), the band announced a run of dates throughout the globe for 2022. Flyer, designed by True Love collaborator Bradley Pinkerton, is below. All dates on sale now! Hovvdy season has arrived.

More True Love from Hovvdy today with a pair of Will-penned beauties: the soft-spoken “Around Again” & propulsive “Junior Day League.” The double-single gets a pair of music videos today as well, with “Around Again” set to an Adam Alonzo fairground rumination (above), and the Hayden Hubner directed clip for “Junior Day League” capturing all the feels of a fast day in a slow town (below). Stream/save them here. 

The songs are from the forthcoming full-length True Love, out October 1st and available for pre-order now. The double single also comes with the welcome news that folks who weren’t able to get a ticket at one of the band’s intimate NY/LA/Austin release shows in October will now be able to stream the set from Gold Diggers. Get tickets for stream access here. 

Samia’s new EP Scout is landing in record stores this Friday – grab a copy here. To celebrate, she’s unveiled a new self-directed music video for her Jelani Aryeh collaborative cover “The Promise.” The clip is literally all sunshine and good vibes, a day in the life of the pair on their first meeting in Los Angeles. The video fits the energy of the cover perfectly.

“I’ve always loved ‘The Promise’ – I love how dramatic it is. Was gonna do a theatrical piano cover but took it to my friend Boone and we thought it would be fun to try and replicate the original as accurately as possible.” She goes on to say, “It shares a common sentiment with the rest of the EP, and it was a perfect opportunity to beg my new favorite artist, Jelani Aryeh, to sing with me. We met up in Malibu for the first time and spent the day filming each other jumping around and driving PCH listening to Wolf Alice! It was perfect.”

In other Samia news, while her tour dates are selling out left and right, there’s a free streaming performance for one and all on August 19th from New York’s Brooklyn Steel. Watch it here. Tickets for the tour available here.

Today Hippo Campus released “Sex Tape,” the second look at their new EP Good Dog, Bad Dream, which arrives on all formats this Friday. The video plays like a YouTube wormhole gleefully colliding with the Photoshop history of Hippo’s graphic designer – elements from the EP & single artwork are interspersed with shots of the band and grainy, glitchy collage. The song is the warmest moment from GDBD, an ode to Minnesota summers and the surprisingly divergent paths similar people find themselves on as life progresses.

In other Hippo news, the band also announced US tour dates. Lots and lots of tour dates. You can get tickets over on the Hippo artist page, and check out the full run listed below.

Finally, this morning the band was announced as a performer at “Water Is Life: Stop Line 3,” a music, art and cultural festival August  18, 2021, at Bayfront Park in Duluth, Minnesota.  Featuring a coalition of musicians, artists, poets and Indigenous leaders, the one-day festival is a celebration of water as the fundamental life-giving resource of Mother Earth, and a full-throttle resistance in music and song against the Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline currently snaking its way through the waterways and Anishinaabe lands of northern Minnesota. Find out more and how to support here.