Hiatus Kaiyote’s first album in six years offers new dimensions to an already multi-dimensional band. Effortlessly inventive, inspiringly life-affirming, and unlike anything else you’ll hear this year.
A lot has happened for Hiatus Kaiyote since 2015’s Choose Your Weapon, their second album. Their hard-to-categorise sound went global, especially after being sampled by musical elite like Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They’ve also signed to Brain Feeder, the esteemed label of Flying Lotus and Thundercat.
Pretty good going for a group of self-professed music nerds.
More significantly, as the Melbourne-based ensemble experienced unprecedented exposure and success, game-changing frontwoman Naomi ‘Nai Palm’ Saalfield was going through tough times.
In late 2018, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which claimed the life of her mother. She beat it but not after a mastectomy and the death of her beloved rescue bird, Charlie.
Profound loss prompted deep self-reflection and Nai, ever the powerful spirit, poured it into art that’s celebratory rather than stricken by grief.
“I guess the biggest lesson for me was facing my mortality,” she said on ABC TV’s The Set earlier this year. “When your cage is rattled, there’s this urgency to give your full self… It’s a blessing you know, because you really experience gratitude for your life, and it wakes you up.”
That sense of life-affirming vibrancy is laid bare on Mood Valiant, an intoxicating listen that finds Nai and her equally talented bandmates – keys wiz Simon Mavin, drummer Perrin Moss, and bassist Paul Bender – further flexing their ridiculous skill but also wrangling their cosmic scope into songs rich with feeling.
Recorded between pre-COVID sessions in Rio de Janeiro and the band’s Melbourne home studio, Mood Valiant isn’t as explosively proggy as past work. The album dials down some of the complexities but none of the innovation; it’s still just as dangerously groovy and sonically stunning.
‘Get Sun’ bristles with lively horns and strings, arranged by revered Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, but its melodies and lyrical conceit are inviting. A mood reinforced by the playful Grey Ghost-directed music video that’s bursting with imagination.
‘Chivalry Is Not Dead’ is a kaleidoscopic ode to getting busy, using urgent, infectious rhythms to buoy Nai Palm’s riffs on the mating rituals of leopard slugs, seahorses, and hummingbirds.
Meanwhile, ‘Red Room’ slinks along on irresistible atmosphere and groove (just begging to be flipped by a hip-hop artist). It is arguably the simplest song Hiatus Kaiyote have ever recorded. It’s also one of their best.
Mixing jazz, hip-hop, funk, RnB, soul, and beyond, Hiatus Kaiyote’s music has always defied easy categorisation but it’s never hard to appreciate.
There’s a whole mirrorball of sounds to discover on Mood Valiant, all threaded together by staples of the Hiatus sound – sublime rhythmic feel, inventive arrangements, and Nai Palm’s mystically woven melodies and vocal harmonies.
The band’s heady noodling and technical wizardry can be overwhelming – dazzling you with tricky time signatures and sudden shifts in mood – but Mood Valiant is a little more forgiving.
Even at its most intricate, it radiates warmth and doesn’t sound like it has as much to prove. (Guess that’s what getting the stamp of approval from hip hop royalty will do for your confidence).
The record’s strongest moments are when the four-piece slow down and ease into things.
The sticky RnB groove of ‘And We Go Gentle’ allows Nai’s voice to unfurl like velvet taffy, while ‘All The Words We Don’t Say’ deploys the titular phrase as a chant that rattles around rhythmic hooks, and then a triumphant chorus worthy of Aretha Franklin’s gospel revelry.
Polyrhythms drive ‘Rosewater’ until the track allows itself space in the climax to return to the airy piano that opened it – drifting away as Nai breathily offers ‘all of my heart’.
‘Stone or Lavendar’ is just as gorgeous – an ivory-and-strings adorned balled that perfects a mood Hiatus have rarely done: unabashedly tender.
Mood Valiant shows us a more human side to this superhuman musical force, emphasising the soul in their soulful commitment to musical curiosity and artful expression.
Here’s praying we don’t wait another six years for their next masterpiece.