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<\/p>\n\u201cWith every stroke of my brush\/I weave a tapestry of rhapsody that\u2019s sewn in my blood\u201d, Pressure raps on the title track, lest you think it\u2019s not poetry, too. What he means by \u201cliteral\u201d is there\u2019s no place for faking it. Not in a country that\u2019s made a blood sport of savaging tall poppies.<\/p>\n
Even this far up the food chain, it\u2019s a sore point on the new album. \u201cWhen you answer your calling they\u2019ll hate on you\u201d are the first words, sung by longtime collaborator Nyassa. \u201c[They\u2019ll] stop you from soaring \u2019cause they want you\/To fall from the light\u201d. The Hoods aren\u2019t having it. The song insists on soaring despite the \u201cmost hated\/most popular\u201d dichotomy social media has amplified a thousandfold since they weathered their earliest detractors.<\/p>\n
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Get Well Soon is even more barbed: \u201cDon\u2019t worry about me\/\u2019Cause I don\u2019t think about you\/If I saw my life through your eyes\/I\u2019d probably hate me, too\u201d. That hook\u2019s sung by Matiu Walters from New Zealand\u2019s Six60, but in a genre renowned for flexing, the self-deprecation in the bravado feels distinctly local.<\/p>\n
This is part of what makes Hilltop Hoods ours. Sure, US hip-hop has matured, in some hands at least, beyond the violence and misogyny of cliche to explore more tender emotional terrain. But as Adelaide\u2019s favourite dads continue to lean inwards, it\u2019s tempting to see parallels with this Australian generation\u2019s evolving sense of self.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess I like to think that hip-hop can be a document of society and sometimes, because it\u2019s so literal, it speaks on current issues,\u201d says Pressure. \u201cWe\u2019re not a political band but are we a reflection of the average life in Australia? Probably.\u201d<\/p>\n
The unfiltered Aussie accents place identity in your face \u2013 a bold move back in the \u201990s for a musical form so entrenched in urban America, and still remarkably potent. But it\u2019s there more subtly, too, in an attitude and humour we can\u2019t fail to recognise as real.<\/p>\n
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Hilltop Hoods (from left): Daniel Smith (Pressure), Matthew Lambert (Suffa) and Barry Francis (DJ Debris). Credit: Dominic Lorrimer<\/p>\n
On the new album, The Omelette is classic Hoods comedy: a cautionary tale about brain-scrambling psychedelic experiments of their youth. Don\u2019t Happy, Be Worry manages to parody cheesy American platitudes and our own preference for gallows humour: \u201cI\u2019m not here for a good time\/Or a long time, from what it looks like\u201d.<\/p>\n
For pop romantics there\u2019s Laced Up, in which the cost of living turns a hot date into a bin fire when the bill arrives: \u201cCan I get a Heimlich manoeuvre?\/I can\u2019t swallow my pride\u201d. The Gift (featuring Marlon Motlop) is an open love letter to a suburban family life awash with music \u2013 surely the only song ever to namecheck Hush.<\/p>\n
Older? Several tracks teeter on the edge of depression but refuse to concede. \u201cIf that thought\u2019s a worry I hold it like it love me,\u201d Suffa raps on This Year. \u201cA bear hug to crush me and then it corrupts me.\u201d Dude. Anybody else feeling that?<\/p>\n
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Again, it\u2019s not like we can\u2019t relate to the good stuff coming out of the US, the UK or anywhere else, but the more familiar the accents, the more unapologetically close to home they feel. In the Hilltop Hoods\u2019 hands, a genre built on revolution and grandstanding is all about humour, tenderness, self-awareness and inclusion. Hate on that if you can.<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s reaffirmation of The Nosebleed Section was a neat precursor, as it turns out, to Fall from the Light. Triple J listeners\u2019 second-favourite Australian song of all time is a rap about communion, not performance; being in the crowd, not above it.<\/p>\n
Pressure isn\u2019t gonna lie. \u201cI\u2019d love to see it come in at No.1,\u201d he says of the new album. But he also knows there\u2019s a gang of KPop rascals snapping at their heels, so he\u2019s keeping expectations modest. Another No.2 would be pretty cool for a bunch of hip-hop dads from Adelaide.<\/p>\n
Fall from the Light is out Friday, August 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWith every stroke of my brush\/I weave a tapestry of rhapsody that\u2019s sewn in my blood\u201d, Pressure raps…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-34513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}