About

“Their fourth album, Hive Mind, is an act of collective conviction. It simplifies and shores up the Internet sound with soft-focus blues, plush arrangements, and deep-in-the-ground grooves. The beats are shapelier, more boldly defined, and yet they still have the capacity to bleed into each other. “They gon’ get us to come together,” a chorus of voices sings on the album’s opening song, each utterance louder than the one before. And just as the title implies, they are more in sync here than ever.

The songs on Hive Mind are more deliberate than those on Ego Death, less likely to liquify into sticky funk codas. The two-act game of cat-and-mouse “Next Time / Humble Pie” is a gorgeous model of the band’s evolution into a singular organism; the song is split in half but the parts are interlinked, mirroring each other. The groovy, Martians-led “Beat Goes On” cracks open to reveal an alternate, ghostly drum ‘n’ bass interpretation. These moments feel less like songs devolving into jam session or rearranging into something wholly distinct from what came before. Instead, they are of a piece with what preceded them, mesmerizing blooms and curves in the arrangements that never sacrifice a song’s momentum. Though less of an odyssey, Hive Mind presents a more holistic sound, the band’s members convening around the presence of their effortlessly cool front person Syd.” –Pitchfork

“Each of the band members’ respective solo projects served as fertile ground for the creation of Hive Mind, fostering the individual growth necessary to produce a well-balanced and explicitly confident group project after three solid formal albums that did more to showcase their ability to serve as keepers of the minimal funk pop flame than to push their work into new and exhilarating sonic territory. Hive Mind is inclusive of lo-fi bedroom beats, post-Soulquarian punk and soul, and the mothership tipico at the root of modern funk nostalgia. It reaches into club culture as deftly as it relaxes into burnt sugar. Lush arpeggios are matched by vocals that absolutely levitate. The band’s acute attention to detail and commitment to singularity create the kind of nuance that makes Hive Mind’s most effervescent compositions practically glitter.” – Consequence of sound

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