Chilean duo The Holydrug Couple have announced details of their new album, Hyper Super Mega for release on September 14th via Sacred Bones, as well as a November tour of the UK and Europe.
It was 10 years ago, in a house on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, that Ives Sepúlveda Minho and Manuel Parra started playing music together, and The Holydrug Couple was effectively born. A decade later, they’ve made Hyper Super Mega, an album that represents the culmination of everything they’ve learned in their years as a band.
Following the release and surrounding tours of their second album, 2015’s Moonlust (Sacred Bones), the duo found themselves back at home, feeling directionless and listless. “The over-riding feeling was one of exhaustion,” Sepúlveda recalls, “exhaustion of the planet and of culture, the overuse of references and information that you see everywhere, in fashion, literature, tourism, music, technology and so on.”
Amidst this feeling of weariness, the words “Hyper”, “Super” and “Mega” struck a chord – these terms with origins so steeped in history and mythology, which have come to represent stark superlatives of consumerism. Hypercapitalism, hypermarket, megalomania, megastorm, megabyte, megabuck, megaplex, superhighway, superhero, supermodel, supersize… “It seemed that the scale of everything over-exaggerates human capacity and time” he notes.
Sonically, if Hyper Super Mega feels, in places, like a classic pop record, that’s because Sepúlveda and Parra spent much of the recording process thinking, too, about the classic pop records of the ’60s and ’70s. Masterpieces by bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Fleetwood Mac were all reference points, not always explicitly in sound, but certainly in spirit. The duo approached the mythos of the “classic album” from their own inimitable perspective, hoping to make a record that felt authentically like The Holydrug Couple that might fit into the same canon.
Overall, Hyper Super Mega is a capsule history of The Holydrug Couple, incorporating a decade of experience recording, touring the world, and absorbing the sights and sounds of their native Chile. It marks the 10th anniversary of a band whose next 10 years look even brighter than the last.
The first track from the new record to be shared is “I’ll Say Only This“. Listen to it below:
Hyper Super Mega artwork & tracklist:
1. Hyper Super Mega
2. Waterfalls
3. Forever End
4. Ikebana Telephone Line
5. Lucifer’s Coat
6. I’ll Only Say This (YouTube | Bandcamp)
7. Easy
8. Chevalier Soda
9. Hotel Cache
10. Western Shade
11. Mercury Lake
The Holydrug Couple tour dates:
12-13 Oct – US – Desert Daze Festival
17 Nov – NL – Amsterdam – Cinetol
18 Nov – UK – Brighton – Green Door Store
19 Nov – UK – Manchester – Now Wave
20 Nov – UK – London – The Lexington
21 Nov – FR – Paris – Point FMR
25 Nov – DE – Cologne – Bumann & Sohn
26 Nov – DE – Hamburg – Hafenklang
27 Nov – DE – Berlin – Urban Spree
28 Nov – DK – Copenhagen – Loppen
29 Nov – NO – Oslo – Revolver
30 Nov – SE – Stockholm – Melodymaker
01 Dec – SE – Malmo – Plan B