Daiana Feuer on February 14th, 2018

0

Cate Le Bon and White Fence’s Tim Presley are back at it with Drinks, following the 2015 album “Hermits On Holiday” with a new one, “Hippo Lite,” out on Drag City on April 20. The album was named after Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort, a small town in southern France where the duo spent a month recording in an old mill recording, without wi-fi or cell service, making friends with bats and birds, and getting familiar with the Jurassic Park trilogy, the only DVDs they had. Le Bon describes a typical day as “Early morning coffee drinking before the sun was too hot to do anything but snooze in the thick walled house. Music in the afternoon after a dip in the river and a cold beer on the square.” They immersed themselves in the quiet life, letting nature permeate their music. Presley says, “We used night sounds, night insects and used frogs as instruments. Did you know frogs have saxophones in their throats?”

First single “Real Outside” feels like an alien encounter, that of Le Bon and Presley experiencing the otherworldliness of simple living. “It was the opposite of what a typical recording experience usually is for any of us,” says Presley. “We tried to capture all of this and put it on record.” His counterpart adds, “An album made for each other by one another with no hands, eyes or ears piercing the bubble other than that of dear friend Stephen Black who kept note of it all.” Black (Sweet Baboo) engineered the record in France with the duo, before it was brought back to Los Angeles to be mixed by Samur Khouja at Seahorse Sound.

||| Stream: “Real Outside”