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Joint of The Moment: “Love Heart Cheat Code” by Hiatus Kaiyote

Melbourne-based, worldwide-beloved, genre-fluid Hiatus Kaiyote returns in 2024 with their new album Love Heart Cheat Code. Naomi “Nai Palm” Saalfield (guitar, vocals), Paul Bender (bass), Simon Mavin (keyboards), and Perrin Moss (drums) debuted in 2012 with LP Tawk Tomahawk, making fans of Erykah Badu, Questlove, and Prince, and embraced by tastemakers like Gilles Peterson and DJ Jazzy Jeff. Their first R&B Grammy nomination, for “Nakamarra,” was followed by another for “Breathing Underwater,” from their second LP, 2015’s Choose Your Weapon and a third for their 2021 album Mood Valiant for Best Progressive R&B Album. They’ve been sampled on songs by The Carters (Beyonce & Jay-Z), Kendrick Lamar, Anderson Paak, Chance The Rapper, and Drake, with whom Nai Palm collaborated on his Scorpion album. For a band that made a name for itself with its complexity and received critical praise and garnered fans from around the globe for their embrace of maximalism, one of the most striking things about their upcoming album Love Heart Cheat Code is its simplicity. “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.”