Hiatus Kaiyote - Love Heart Cheat Code

Love Heart Cheat Code is a snapshot of four musicians dancing together on the edge, 11 playful, exuberant tracks that shine light. Yet, for a band that made a name for itself with its complexity and received critical praise and multiple Grammy nominations for their embrace of maximalism, one of the most striking things about Love Heart Cheat Code is its simplicity. “I’m a maximalist. I complicate fucking everything,” Nai laughs. “But the more you go through things in life, you become more relaxed and uninhibited. Sometimes you can still have depth and reach people and really stop dancing around the fact: What do you want to communicate to people? And I feel like this album is a result of that clarity for us. We didn’t need to spell out complexity if the song didn’t call for it.”

On the album, the band’s direction is not always attained directly; less deliberate, and more via deliberation and drift: in jam sessions that last late into the night and early mornings; in meals shared; in messing around with equipment and with each other. The album also features other Melbourne-based musicians like Taylor “Chip” Crawford, who played an instrument of his own invention called the frello; guitarist Tom Martin; and flautist Nikodimos; and the unprecedented addition of a very important creative force: Mario Caldato, whose work with the Beastie Boys and Seu Jorge is the stuff of legends.

Hiatus Kaiyote have always spoken about their albums as microcosms, a complete ecosystem. On Love Heart Cheat Code the band envisioned a strong visual world to coincide with the music and they worked with Sri Lanken born, Toronto based multimedia artist Rajni Perera using one of her paintings as the artwork for the album. Illustrator Chloe Biocca and Grey Ghost then collaborated with the band to create visual symbols and associated artifacts for each of the tracks on the project that pair alongside Rajni’s painting. The artifacts morphed into real products, custom jewelry, edible goods, ranging from the inspired to the haunted and utterly random. Eventually this led the band to conceive of an entirely imagined place, a Love Heart Cheat Code supermarket. The band; its employees who create these products, market them, stack the shelves, clean the aisles. In the banality of creating art into ‘product’ for the modern world the band find solace in each item and song as they are packed with transcendent and resplendent musical magic.

Throughout the album, Hiatus Kaiyote emphasizes sensing rather than knowing, a type of trust that can only be brought through creative harmony and hours of studio sessions. The result is a wide-eyed, cohesive, yet relaxed body of work that reflects a deeper understanding of themselves and the music they wish to share with the world around them.