Hiatus Kaiyote Love Heart Cheat Code

Melbourne-based band Hiatus Kaiyote announces their forthcoming album Love Heart Cheat Code due June 28th via Brainfeeder Records / Ninja Tune. Alongside the announcement, the band shares their new single out “Make Friends,” the second offering from their upcoming project following their previously-released single “Everything’s Beautiful.” The band are also sharing a visual announcement of the album revealing the playful 3-D world of a family supermarket that the band have created to accompany the music.

A final unscripted addition to the album, “Make Friends” was inspired by words of wisdom imparted to the band by a friend who noted, “You don’t make friends, you recognize them.” Succinct yet profound, this sage insight reminded Nai of the lack of representation for deep, platonic love. “I wanted to have representation for just the different examples of people that I love from the women in my life, to the men, to my non-binary friends,” she shares, “and it was very natural and fun to work on as a formula.” The single is composed of one verse, but Nai takes that one verse through three gender permutations: female, male, and nonbinary. Nai adds, “When I sang the third verse, the ‘them/they’ verse, I actually had to stop. Just realizing that inclusivity is so often denied to some of the people that I love the most, my best besties.”

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.”