For the four devout Midwesterners that make up Minnesota indie pop-rock band Hippo Campus, touring through major cities like New York wasn’t always as comfortable as it is for them now more than 10 years into their careers — but they’ve always had their ways of coping.
“I love coming here now,” 30-year-old guitarist Nathan Stocker tells Billboard backstage at the Bowery Ballroom in lower Manhattan, where he and his bandmates were hours away from performing an album-release show Tuesday (Sept. 24). “It used to scare me until I was well into the night, a couple beers deep, just chain smoking. And then it was like ‘Yeah, I love New York!’”
After years of heavy drinking on show nights, Stocker is sober now – and so is the rest of the band, for the most part. There’s still room for some balance; at one point in the show later that night, 29-year-old frontman Jake Luppen asks the crowd to send a shot of whisky to the stage, and when two arrive at the same time, he downs them both as 28-year-old bassist Zach Sutton shakes his head with gentle disapproval. But the quartet’s overall tamer approach to life on the road is just one of many things that’s different about the cult-favorite group in the age of their latest album, Flood, which dropped Sept. 20 via new label Psychic Hotline, having departed Grand Jury Records after their original record deal expired.
Luppen and 29-year-old drummer Whistler Allen, for instance, both own homes back in their home state, and all four members are in committed relationships (Luppen got engaged over the summer). The group is far from the early 20-somethings who dropped Billboard 200-charting debut album Landmark in 2017 and slept on dirty van floors on tour, and even farther from the Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists classmates who first started releasing music together in 2013. Now all pushing 30, Hippo Campus is finally coming out on the other side of years of growing pains, spawned by the natural push and pull of four people who’ve been best friends, bandmates and business partners for more than a decade.
Early in the writing sessions for Flood, they started going to therapy as a group to help parse the big questions – around the same time as which Stocker quit drinking – and a lot of that introspection bleeds into the 13 tracks on the finished product. On the thrashing ode to anxiety “Paranoid,” Luppen sings, “I wanna give this life all that I havе in me,” and on optimistic album closer “I Got Time,” he muses, “If this is as good as it gets I’ll be more than fine.”
But even as they were each evolving in their personal lives, they found that it was difficult to let go of the songs they were making in the two-year period between their last album, 2022’s LP3, and now. On a self-designated mission to make the best Hippo Campus record ever, they got stuck in an endless loop — writing more than 100 songs, recording them over and over, and arranging multiple versions of their fourth album just to scrap them soon afterward. They thought they might’ve cracked it last summer while on the road, until Luppen declared to the rest of the group that, again, it simply wasn’t good enough.
Realizing they couldn’t keep going as they had been, Hippo Campus left Minnesota to record yet another version of the album, this time at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, Tex. They set a 10-day deadline and, with the help of producers Caleb Wright and Brad Cook — and using everyone from Phoenix to Big Thief, Tom Petty and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as reference points — forced themselves to record their parts simultaneously as they would on stage. No listening back to takes. No repeated attempts. Only forward motion.
The result was a set of existential, self-conscious tracks with the same luminous energy and unpredictable melodies Hippo is known for, reinvigorated by the ease with which the analog instrumentation they adhered to in the studio translates to the stage. As much was evident at their New York show Tuesday night, where they played Flood front to back for a palpably excited audience that was already screaming along to the words of songs that had come out just four days prior. At one point, Luppen stops singing to cough — he recovered from COVID-19 last week, but not before having to cancel the band’s scheduled hometown release shows — but their passionate fans have no trouble taking over lead vocals in his place on anthemic single “Everything at Once.”
With touring serving as their main source of income, the group will stay on the road through February, playing theaters and auditoriums across North America and the U.K. along with one festival show in Bangkok. And their fans will follow. One 22-year-old listener, Abby, was camped outside the 9:00 p.m. Bowery performance since the early afternoon to get as close as possible to the stage for what would be her 52nd Hippo Campus show; the next day, she said she’d be traveling to Washington, D.C. to catch her 53rd.
“It’s so rad,” Luppen says of their fans’ devotion. “It always surprises me that anyone would be down to do that for us. That’s a big reason why we keep going, you know? Those people really believe in it, and that allows us to believe in it.”
Below, Billboard catches up with Stocker and Sutton backstage before their show at the Bowery — followed by Luppen and Allen on Zoom the next day – about growing up, ditching bad habits and the messy beauty of starting over:
What were your initial reactions to Jake saying you needed to scrap years of work and start over on Flood?
Sutton: He was the first to verbalize an emotion we were all feeling. We had to be honest about where we were in the process and where we wanted to go from there. But there was a lot of arguing about what to throw away.
Stocker: Jake’s expression of that concern is valid … once that’s brought to our attention, it’s our job to attend to it. But also, it’s like, “God dammit dude — can’t we just say goodbye to this thing and move on?”
Allen: I remember listening to it and feeling excited for the songs, but deep down, I was like, ‘It just needs to get mixed right or something.’ Which tends to be an excuse for something else that’s lacking.
What was missing?
Luppen: It just didn’t sound like we were having fun playing music. We went into the record wanting to make the best Hippo Campus record ever. It immediately put a lot of pressure on the thing. The stakes were so high that, personally, I was stressed out the entire time — second-guessing songs, second-guessing the performances.
Sutton: We were too zoomed in. We’d been chasing these 100 songs for a year in a half. We were like, “We have lost the f–king plot.”
What needed to change for Flood to finally come together?
Allen: We were just so separated most of the time at home. It was rare at a certain point that we were all in the same room. At Sonic Ranch, we were all there — we had to be there. We had to make ourselves experience it, whether we wanted to or not.
Luppen: Hippo Campus, when it’s at its best, is us playing music together in a room. To make the best Hippo Campus record is to capture the feeling that our live shows capture. The best way to do that was to track all together at the same time.
Allen: Doing what we did at Sonic Ranch is proof that [recording live] is a crucial thing for us, to make ourselves be in an isolated space and just get s–t done. Otherwise, we just get too relaxed or comfortable or lazy.
Will fans ever hear those other 100 songs?
Sutton: I f–king hope so. Those are some of my favorite songs.
Stocker: The large majority of them, probably not.
Sutton: Once a song is considered so heavily and inevitably shelved, it’s hard to go back to that shelf. It’s shouldered with all the disagreements that we had about the song.
Stocker: “You used to f–king hate this one, you want to release it now?” [Laughs.] All the songs we have in the back room collecting dust, those tear at us in a lot of different ways. Because they’re still ours.
What is Flood about for you personally?
Stocker: It’s a line of simple questioning: Am I good enough? Do I love you? Am I a phony?
Sutton: The motif seems like redefining where you are, especially as a group. This is our fourth record: Who are we now? Where do we want to go?
Luppen: Flood is like being naked in a lit room with a mirror held up to you, and being like, “Embrace this.” It’s a testament to all the things we need to be doing to take care of ourselves and live better. Now that we’re into our 30s, we wanted Flood to be the start of the music we make in those years, where you’re not driven by this youthful crazy energy.
How does touring look different for you as you get older?
Stocker: We usually cap it at three weeks now. It’s the longest we’ll go out without a break, just so we can maintain a level of sanity.
Allen: It’s chilled out so much. With [Nathan’s] new sobriety over the last couple of years, that was a big shift on the whole group. 2022 was the grand finale of what it used to be for us on the big LP3 tour. I just remember being at the end of that tour feeling f–king wiped. That was definitely a wakeup call.
Sutton: At our worst, we’d get up at noon, have a beer, then not eat anything until the show. You do what you think you’re supposed to do – “Oh, it’s a party!” — there was a culture that was set by all of us.
Luppen: It was like partying in a Midwestern way, where we’d just get wasted on the bus and watch Harry Potter.
Allen: Now everybody’s chilling, getting in their bus bunk by 11:00 p.m.
Why was sobriety important for the band?
Luppen: We were using alcohol, I think, to numb fatigue or nerves. I have the life that I’ve always dreamed of, and I want to be present and there for it, even if that means I’m riding the waves a little deeper on the ups and the downs. It’s better than just sleepwalking your way through life.
Stocker: With not drinking and having a newfound clarity within my personal life … I became obsessed with fulfilling this vision of myself that I had, which was, ‘If you are going to do this thing, you have to do it the best that you can.’ That meant showing up every day and writing a song if I could. I felt like I had to make up for lost time from being perpetually wasted for 10 years.
Other than sobriety, what did you need to discuss in band therapy?
Sutton: I couldn’t talk to anyone in the band without seeing all the f–king baggage. The biggest disagreement is defining what Hippo Campus is. We all have different answers about the music — mainly how the music’s made — and what the music’s saying.
Stocker: We needed to have conversations about how things had been and how not to go back there, because that was dark and harmful. It was really affirmative in, like, “Okay, yes, we’re still friends, we haven’t done anything to each other that’s irreparable damage or anything like that.” We can reestablish these healthy lines of communication so that, moving forward with this record as friends, individuals, human beings and business partners, we can do this in a healthy way.
Luppen: It was us paying to force ourselves to talk to each other. We all changed a lot over the pandemic in our personal lives, with our partners and everything. On top of that, we’ve been friends since we were 14. In a lot of ways, we were still communicating with each other like we were still in high school. Therapy allowed me to see everybody for where they’re at now.
Why did you change labels to Psychic Hotline when your deal with Grand Jury Records ended?
Luppen: We wanted to try something different this time around. We kind of shopped [Flood] around to a lot of different labels. We talked to majors, we talked to indies. Frankly, it was pretty disappointing. There were a lot of major labels that passed on it, which was confusing for us. We’ve spent 10 years working our asses off building a very organic, sustainable business.
Allen: We were told that they loved the record, but there’s just not enough “virality” in the band. It’s proof that they’re not interested in the actual success of a band, they’re just interested in the little spike in numbers that bring in royalties and syncs or whatever the f–k. Then as soon as that band doesn’t provide that same accidental moment, it’s all over.
Luppen: Psychic Hotline is run by our manager [Martin Anderson]. It was the option that allowed us the most freedom and cared the most about the project. It was clear they loved the music and they really understood us on a deep level. We were like, “Let’s just bet on ourselves like we’ve done our entire career and grassroots this motherf–ker.”
Stocker: Having the management side of things already taken care of and having them already be so close to us throughout that creative process, it made sense to bring them in on the label side as well.
What are your goals for the band? Are you actively trying to expand?
Sutton: It would be stupid to say, ‘Still not there yet.’ Like, this is it. To say I want anything more would be so ungrateful. I do always feel very competitive about being the best version of ourselves. I want to be in the same conversation as all the people that influenced me.
Allen: There are still some things we would like to do. We’ve never done a Tiny Desk, or some talk shows.
Stocker: We still have this idea that we want to be the biggest band in the world, but that is not something we’re interested in at the cost of our integrity and our friendships.
Luppen: It’s about preserving what we have at this point and not burning out. When I was younger, I was constantly trying to climb this hill that had no end. The biggest goal we could ever imagine was selling out Red Rocks [in Colorado] when we started the band, and we did that. Playing arenas … that doesn’t sound attractive to us. We’re happy with where we’re at. If more people come in, I’m always grateful for that.
I think there’s a record we have yet to make that really captures everything. We thought maybe it was going to be [Flood], and this one gets closer. But for me it’s about cracking a perfect Hippo record. Every Hippo record we’ve kind of had to learn to love.
But isn’t that kind of the same thought process that got you into the endless writing cycle with Flood?
Luppen: It’s a blessing and a curse. We’re always sort of hungry for something that’s just past what you’re capable of doing. But I do think that is a driving force of what makes Hippo rad. Maybe we’ll never make that record, or maybe we already made that record. Who the f–k knows?
You raise a good point, though. I’m gonna reflect on that.
