Hippo Campus - FLOOD Tour

Name: Hippo Campus - FLOOD Tour
Start: 2025-05-12T20:00:00-07:00
Location: The Showbox

Schedule

Mon, 12 May, 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

The Showbox | Seattle, WA

Showbox Presents
FLOOD Tour
HIPPO CAMPUS
with Hotline TNT
MON, 12 MAY 2025 at 08:00PM PDT
Ages: All Ages to Enter, 21 & Over to Drink
Doors Open: 07:00PM
OnSale: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 at 10:00AM PDT
Announcement: Thu, 5 Sep 2024 at 09:00AM PDT
Hippo Campus were sitting in the green room of a sold-out amphitheater show at the start of theSummer of 2023 when they realized they had a major problem. Their fourth LP simply wasn’tgood enough. Singer Jake Luppen had been listening to the band’s work as they rolled aroundthe country, trying to tease out how much work remained. All of it, he soon decided. The soulwasn’t there, obfuscated by the need to sound sophisticated and the overwhelming ambition tomake the best Hippo Campus LP ever, a deeper and more profound record that reflected howtheir lives were changing.They’d committed to that vow with longtime producer and collaborator Caleb Wright a littlemore than a year earlier, soon after a party where they celebrated the release of LP3. That verynight, the call came that a longtime friend had unexpectedly died. They started this band as kidsand enjoyed quick momentum, their thrill-a-minute live shows and charismatically experimentalpop albums creating almost-instant, avid attention. But this was Hippo Campus’ first close brushwith death; as adulthood encroached, the actual call of mortality reminded them of the stakes ofart, friendship, and life.So they committed to doing something major, even if it meant taking five years to do it. Theytook the task seriously, too: getting sober for an entirely improvisational session at NorthCarolina’s Drop of Sun months later, regularly attending therapy as a full band, writing morethan 100 songs in only a year. That was all well and good, until Luppen and, really, all of HippoCampus decided they didn’t actually like what they were making. Life and work had been darkin their orbit for a second—death and dejection, addiction and anxiety. This uneasy epiphanywasn’t helping.So that night, in the dressing room, they called an audible. They were going to start over. Threemonths later, the four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvoused with Wright and producerBrad Cook at Sonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas border. They gavethemselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, to make something to which they couldcommit at last. And Cook, in turn, gave them an edict of no second guessing or listening back,only forward momentum. Less than two weeks later, they emerged with what they’d giventhemselves half a decade to make—Flood, or the best album Hippo Campus has ever made.You can immediately hear as much in a pair of wondrous songs toward the end, when the love-lost-and-found sing-along “Forget It” fades into the bittersweet and beautiful ache of “Closer,” agem about trying and maybe failing to surrender your trust to someone else. This is a band thathas learned to grow up by learning to let go. When Hippo Campus finally stopped trying to forcethe issue of making a masterpiece, they tapped intersecting veins of vulnerability and urgency,walking away with 13 tracks that reckon with their uncanny lives through at least that manytotally absorbing hooks.During the last several years, Hippo Campus has had to navigate the tougher wages of success.They are, of course, grateful that a pop band they named on the lark of some psychology lessonblew up, but it certainly eliminated the segue from adolescence to adulthood that most of usenjoy in relative privacy. How could they survive inside and alongside this thing they had createdand had outgrown them? And what’s more, how could they endure the vagaries of the musicindustry, so that they didn’t let a disappointing tour or disspiriting release demoralize them? Or,to ask the cumulative question, how do four people connected so intimately for so long grow asindividuals while preserving the bond that makes what they do so special? Or is that actually toomuch to ask?For a minute there, the answer seemed possibly like yes. But soon after that improvisationalsession, the band returned to its own Minneapolis studio and dug in. They stumbled upon“Everything at Once,” with Nathan Stocker’s tricky little guitar lope becoming the basis for theslowly rising rhythm of drummer Whistler Allen and bassist Zach Sutton. Stepping outside forsome space, Luppen quickly penned a thesis of self-criticism and self-forgiveness. Being lessthan the expectations of an industry, a family, or a faith are totally normal, he suggests in ananthem of empowerment that is almost casual. He gives himself the grace of being human: “Yougotta lay down sometimes, be patient sometimes,” Luppen sings, layers of lean vocalscrisscrossing one another like light beams. “And feel everything at once.”That is precisely what Hippo Campus do best on Flood—feel everything and transmute it all intosongs that are inescapable. Take “Brand New,” three minutes of brilliantly coiled pop, its spring-loaded rhythm lifting a guitar line built from pin pricks skyward. It’s about being ruined by theletdown of a failed relationship and then finding a way forward, toward something so good youhaven’t even imagined it yet. It sounds that way, too. There’s the completely compulsive “ToothFairy,” a quick-moving meditation on the confusion of interpersonal dynamics. Hippo Campussmear bits of gentle psychedelia around a rhythm, riff, and hook that have the sleek lines of asports car; the result is a dynamic wonder, a song that feels emphatic at the start but reaches fulltriumph by the end. Inspired by staring down cycles of addiction too long without taking steps tobreak them, “Corduroy” finds the space between a bummer country blues and a sweetlydevotional waltz. Its vows of love, trust, and doubt are buoyed and also undercut by its slow risesand falls, a musical portrait of trying to take that difficult next step.The sentiments on Flood are raw, real, and unguarded, a testament to Hippo Campus droppingpreconceptions of how they had to sound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs.They wiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what Hippo Campus or this recordneeded to be. Still, sophistication lurks in subtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innateshifts that a band of longtime best friends can tap after so much time spent helping to shape oneanother’s musical language. Flood doesn’t need to tell you it’s important or interesting; it simplyis, just by virtue of how it’s written, built, and rendered, a map of what it’s like to feel everythingat once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift for Hippo Campus, too, as they exitthe traditional label system to issue LP4 via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run bypeers and pals. If you’re working to let go of expectations, why not jettison them all? There’s abravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit in every second of LP4.Early into the endlessly propulsive “Paranoid,” where stunted acoustic strums undergird aninescapable jangle, Luppen asks an existential question: “Is there something waiting out there forus at the finish line?” For the next three minutes, the band cycles with him through his woes,from the title’s overwhelming worry to notions of dislocation and loneliness. (Also, is there anyother refrain ever that manages to make the phrase “so god-damned fucking” sound so catchyand natural?) But in the final verse, with his voice breaking through a scrim of distortion, hestumbles upon a new credo: “Wait, I wanna give this life all that I have in me.” That is preciselywhat Hippo Campus have done with Flood after realizing it doesn’t take a lifetime—or, well,five years—to do just that.