The Kings are back. The Hilltop Hoods’ highly anticipated sequel to their double platinum, ARIA award winning album Drinking From The Sun is here, and damn son it’s going to put a stop to the line ‘I like your old stuff better than your new stuff’.
There is no doubting that hip hop is now well and truly cemented in the Australian musical mainstream, much thanks to the men in question, and MC Suffa (Matt Lambert) isn’t too fazed about the extra pressure to deliver from album to album.
”I’ve always understood that mentality myself… when you hear a new album from someone that you’re a fan of it might be a 100% better album but it’s not the album you had your first spliff with in the back of your friends car.”
As to having to deal with it, Suffa nonchalantly shrugs it off. “It gets to a stage where you’re like, rather than going ‘no this is way better how dare you’ it becomes more like ‘nah man I hope you like it’.”
Walking Under Stars was on the lips and minds of all hip hop fans when it was mentioned during the interludes of Drinking From The Sun that the Adelaide trio had already planned and begun work on their next record. ‘From day one we were making two albums’ was the final line of the record, and it may have taken the Hoods a little longer than intended to drop part two, but the undeniable MC Suffa wasn’t too fussed about the delay.
“Pressure (the trio’s other MC)’s life got shit so we had to have a little break, we initially planned to have it out last year but musically it’s probably for the best, we had a little more time to give it more attention and more love.”
There is a noticeable contrast between Drinking From The Sun and Walking Under Stars in that a number of the songs are quite introspective and personal on the latest record, compared to some of the more worldly theme’s on the former.
“[MC] Pressure’s life got shit so we had to have a little break, we initially planned to have it out last year but musically it’s probably for the best”The album’s introspective focus is “sort of what we wanted, [it’s] a bit of light and shade,” Suffa asserted.
No tracks were more personal than MC Pressure’s (Daniel Smith) solo track, the heart-string pulling ‘Through The Dark’ which touches upon the effects cancer have had on his family in recent times. But this is not the only track which uses the model of personal experience being converted into a powerful and uplifting song with personally relatable themes.
“I hope [the album] does connect with people, it has themes everyone can relate to, with P’s (MC Pressure) track there’s not many people who haven’t been touched by cancer, ‘Won’t Let You Down’, there’s not many people who can’t relate to a track about their partner. Tracks like ‘Live And Let Go’ which is a really simple track about pain and working through it and even ‘Rumble Young Man Rumble’ which is about strength, it’s just simple themes that have been expanded upon.”
Another part of planning their record was establishing who is going to have the honour of featuring on a Hilltop Hoods release. This time around it was the likes of Maverick Sabre, Brother Ali, Aaradhana, and fellow Australians Dan Sultan and Drapht.
Collectively this group is one of pure soul, passion and power which is very evident on all the songs they feature in. After keenly telling of his love for all these artists as if they were his own children, Suffa explains how the collaborations came about.
“Aaradhana and Maverick [Sabre] we were fans of and we reached out to them, Brother Ali is probably Pressure’s number one MC of all time, so he’s been on the bucket list for a long time, so we reached out and recorded with him in New York which was super special. Dan Sultan and Drapht we know and admire both a huge amount and especially for ‘Rumble Young Man, Rumble’ we wrote a hook for it and it was just out of my register so we needed to bring someone in and Dan was the perfect fit.”
But as planned as an album can be, not everything can be accounted for, as Suffa went on to explain.
“At the end of the day when you’re making songs and songs are coming together, some things get out of your hands, they tend to start making themselves. I mean you can’t go ‘this is a song that is gonna sound like this and it’s gonna work out just great’,” he says with tongue in cheek.
Dropping Walking Under Stars is just one piece of the puzzle for the Hoods as their live show goes global. After already venturing across the ditch to New Zealand and traipsing through Europe in July on an essentially sold out tour and with a massive month of shows in the USA during September, the prospect of the Hoods blowing up worldwide had Suffa licking his lips.
“We’ve managed to get more locals along and less ex-pats, don’t get me wrong its great having the ex-pats come along but when you’re in another territory you want the locals to come along. (I mean outside of London where there were a shit load of Australians) and we’re certainly doing that.”
The Hilltop Hoods are going to be super busy before a string of home coming shows in Australia during October and November. This was all an exciting prospect for Suffa.
“I can’t see a break happening any time soon. If our manager has his way we’ll be on the road for two years non-stop, and we’re keen to because we’ve been off the road for a while, Splendour was the first show we had in Australia for 18 months.”
In short the Hilltop Hoods will be rattling the keys in your city, with a whole bunch of new classics sometime very soon, this is sweet music (so to speak) to the ears of hip hop fans all over.
Walking Under Stars is out this Friday the 8th via Universal
