Hiatus Kaiyote announces their next album, Love Heart Cheat Code, and drops the single “Make Friends.” A band member heard someone say “You don’t make friends, you recognize them” and this inspired their new single. Lead singer Nai Palm starts the song with those words and puts her emotions into describing the soulful journey to friendship. She says,
“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. 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.”
“Make Friends” is the second single from Love Heart Cheat Code. In January, they released “Everything Is Beautiful.”
The Melbourne natives have a new visual direction on the album as well. They worked with illustrators Chloe Biocca and Grey Ghost to create visual symbols for the songs and a painting by Rajni Perera is the cover art. The symbols have artifacts that became products like jewelry and food. The band then conceived a Love Heart Cheat Code store and they made a commercial for it. Love Heart Cheat Code will be released on June 28th via Brainfeeder. The band will embark on a tour of North America that starts June 21st. Two of those shows will be with Digable Planets and The Free Nationals.
