About

Choose Your Weapon is the second studio album by Australian neo-soul quartet Hiatus Kaiyote, first released in May 2015 through Salaam Remi's record label Flying Buddha and Sony Masterworks. Following the release of the band's debut album Tawk Tomahawk (2012) and the band's grammy nomination, Hiatus Kaiyote went on to tour throughout 2014. Recording sessions for the album took place in Australia and the United States, with the band aiming to create an album based on the format of mixtape, with the inclusion of interludes. All members of the band contributed lyrics and production; Remi served as the album's executive producer.

Choose Your Weapon is a neo soul album that takes influence from a variety of genres including jazz, soul, R&B, progressive rock, West African funk, and samba and Latin grooves. Choose Your Weapon's lyrics touch upon themes of supernatural topics, technological subjects and death. Upon release Choose Your Weapon was met with universal acclaim from music critics, who praised the album's production and musical structure, and was named as one of the year’s best albums. Commercially Choose Your Weapon saw some success and debuted at number twenty two on the Australian albums chart.

The song "Breathing Underwater" from Choose Your Weapon was nominated for Best R&B Performance at the 58th Grammy Awards. - Wiki

Wrapped in soul, blending poetry and polyrhythms, the music of Hiatus Kaiyote is in a lane all by itself. The Grammy-nominated four-piece band returns to stereos worldwide with their new album Choose Your Weapon.

The 18-track, 70-minute odyssey from the Melbourne, Australia-based band takes listeners on a journey through the group's self-created ecosystem, populated with songs each embodying its own mini-cinematic sonic soundscape. The album is the hotly anticipated follow-up to their celebrated 2013 debut album Tawk Tomahawk. Look for the band to tour across the globe in 2015.

Fans have already gotten a taste of what's to come on Choose Your Weapon by way of their December 2014 EP, By Fire, which featured three of the album's 18 tracks. ""By Fire" is a burial song," says frontwoman Nai Palm, about the personal track. "It discusses the creative and destructive forces of fire and uses this element as a reference point to express about my father passing away in a house fire." – Music On Vinyl

“'Choose Your Weapon' takes on the feel of a better travelled nomad. It's a project pad stitched together after two world tours, written in various locations and wondrously diverse as a result. Homages to everything from samba, blues-led scatting, prog rock (a la Gentle Giant), funk and percussive soul are still there in abundance.

The difference is how succinctly the 18 tracks flow from start to finish as a body of work. 'Choose Your Weapon' is refreshingly varied on more than one axis. Time signatures skip and dance between chorus and verse, instruments overlap harmoniously and Nai Palm's vocals are a constant source of measured acrobatics atop it all.

Take cuts like 'Breathing Underwater' where Palm's guitar noodling and vocal pirouetting are backed by the band constantly hopscotching grooves with ease. 'Molasses' simply feels amazing - groovy as ever and brimming with sunshine and whiffs of summer. Props must go to bassist Paul Bender for really stepping to the fore with silky handiwork on the four strings.” – CLASH

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