Hiatus Kaiyote: Choose Your Weapon (2LP+7", deluxe edition, photoluminescent transparent vinyl) [BRAINFEEDER]

Why you'll love it

This deluxe Brainfeeder edition glows in the dark and adds a bonus 7-inch with a cello rework of "Breathing Underwater" and a club mix of "Making Friends With Studio Owl." "Breathing Underwater" earned the Melbourne band a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Performance.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Bonus 7" single
• Photoluminescent transparent vinyl
• Deluxe edition
• Bonus tracks

About the album

Hiatus Kaiyote spent two years touring after their first Grammy nod, and they came home with a lot of ideas. Choose Your Weapon is the sound of all of them making it onto one album: eighteen tracks, seventy minutes, recorded in Melbourne studios and Miami's Instrument Zoo, built to be heard start to finish like a mixtape. The band stitched the songs together with interludes written while they were simply jamming in the room.

Nai Palm wrote the songs, some of them as a teenager ("Fingerprints" dates from when she was 16, and "Jekyll" is one of the first she ever wrote), while Paul Bender, Simon Mavin and Perrin Moss bend jazz, neo-soul, West African funk, samba and prog around her voice. "Breathing Underwater" is the radiant centrepiece, "Laputa" floats, and "Shaolin Monk Motherfunk" and "Atari" twist the time signatures into knots. Salaam Remi executive produced.

Critics put it on their year-end lists, and the band had already caught the ear of Erykah Badu and Animal Collective. The photoluminescent vinyl glows once the lights go off, which is handy, since nobody in the room will be ready for bed anyway.

Also at Kops: more Hiatus Kaiyote on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Brainfeeder / Masterworks (cat# BF120), a reissue of the 2015 album.