Hovvdy by Hovvdy | Album Review
Hovvdy draws from a wide range of influences on a sweeping album exploring life’s challenges and time’s passing.
Self-titling an album is a bold move. You’re signaling to your audience that this is the definitive sound of your band. But to Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, the duo behind Hovvdy, the decision to self-title their new record evolved naturally from the process of writing and recording this set of songs. “I think it’s our most robust statement to date, and so I feel like it makes a lot of sense to come back to the band name,” Will told Our Culture in a recent interview. “It’s an essential Hovvdy record that’s doing something bigger than we’ve done in the past,” Charlie added.
On previous albums, Hovvdy have often looked for ways to expand their sound and do something new. The band continues to tread new ground on this record, but they also incorporate the best parts of past sonic experiments. Over the course of their previous four albums, they have built a large musical toolkit, and now they’re reaching in and pulling out their favorite elements.
The result is the most polished and complete album in Hovvdy’s discography, with something to love for fans of the band’s previous eras as well as new sounds that continue Hovvdy’s evolution. In that regard, it’s easy to understand the decision to self-title this ambitious double album.
Both Charlie and Will were drummers in other bands before they formed Hovvdy, and you can tell they pay close attention to the rhythmic elements of their music. On “Bubba,” the album’s opening song after a brief intro track, the arpeggiated piano is accompanied by a loop of filtered hi-hats. “Bubba” then leads into “Jean,” which is bolstered by rhythmic acoustic guitar and syncopated piano hits. Even the vocals become part of the rhythmic texture at times, like they do during the verses of “Bad News,” which are sung with a flow reminiscent of a modern hip-hop track: “A caution light said you would never give in/ Pretty like a picture, broken when it bent/ Starlight, black sky, I’m taken by my view of the end.”
In the past, Charlie and Will have mostly written songs in isolation and then come together to collaborate during the recording process. However, on this album, the duo spent more time working together during the initial songwriting period. As they explained in their recent sit-down with Our Culture, this was also the first time that both band members, producer Andrew Sarlo, and frequent collaborater Ben Littlejohn were all in the same room for every recording session. “That was really special and really essential to how the record sounds, really emphasizing live takes and collaborating a lot,” Charlie said in the interview.
Hovvdy have always pulled from a wide range of influences, and the band has previously discussed the ways they have been inspired by hip-hop. “I’ve been listening to Will’s demo’s, and there’s definitely a lot of [rapper] Young Thug in there,” Charlie said in a 2020 interview with Secret Meeting. “I think we’re both really inspired by the free descending rhythms that you hear a lot right now in hip hop and pop.” In addition to the vocal flows that appear throughout the album, you can also hear this influence on some of the drum tracks, like the trap-inspired drum machine beat and 16th note hi-hat loop on “Every Exchange.”
They were initially known as a lo-fi, slowcore band, but the members of Hovvdy have now been honing their pop sensibilities for years. “I’m slowly warming up to letting myself be pop,” Will commented in a 2018 Vice interview. That evolution continues on their self-titled album. On previous records, the band often hasn’t found much use for the conventional verse-chorus songwriting structure, but on this album, they write some of their most memorable choruses, bolstered by polished studio production.
“Meant,” one of the album’s most pop-leaning songs, illustrates this next phase of Hovvdy’s songwriting. The song opens with the dramatic sounds of synthesized strings, which are then joined by a massive drumbeat. The song builds to one of the album’s catchiest hooks and lyrics that thank a loved one for being there during a difficult time: “I needed you to stay right here and you did/ I wanted you to know how much it meant.”
But the band still explores more unconventional songwriting structures at times. Instead of the ebb and flow of the verse-chorus form, “Til I Let You Know” slowly builds over the course of its two-minute runtime. “You know my time is all I have” echoes over the acoustic guitar centered instrumental.
Even with all the pop and hip-hop elements, Hovvdy eventually drift back to their more subdued, lo-fi roots for some of the album’s more introspective moments. Over an intimate acoustic guitar, “Heartstrings” reflects on past moments and wonders if things could have turned out differently: “If I’d gone where I could have been/Would we be what we ended with?/ If we crossed at another time/ Where would we spend our lives?” The song then zooms out and turns to a meditation on time itself. “Do you still feel too young?/ Time, it’s tough to outrun.”
It’s these themes of time’s unstoppable march and the inevitability of life’s challenges that bring together all of the album’s genre-defying sonic combinations. “Make Ya Proud” describes the mix of joy and grief that accompany memories of a lost loved one. “Portrait” is another standout track from the album that takes up these ideas. “Hold my breath to the top of the hill/ See the world move while I’m standing still,” Will sings, backed by acoustic guitar and pedal steel.
The album closes with the country-tinged folk song “A Little.” This final shift in the sonic texture ends the album with yet another display of Hovvdy’s impressive versatility. The song sums up the record’s ideas through the sights and sounds of a rainy day: “See the rain through my window/ Watch it dampen the glow/ Hear a distant voice humming/ A tune that reminds me of you.”
Hovvdy is a band that’s constantly searching for something new and doing everything they can to avoid being placed within fixed categories or genres. On this album, Hovvdy accomplishes these goals both by seeking out novel influences and combining elements of their past work in new ways. It will be exciting to see which boxes the band breaks out of next.
You can listen to Hovvdy’s self-titled album on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your music. Check out tour date’s on the band’s website.
