Blvck Hippie (USA) + Guests

About

Memphis, TN's Blvck Hippie will release their new album Basketball Camp on June 14th. I wanted to write a record that I needed to hear in high school. shares the band's Josh Shaw (they/them). With Basketball Camp, Blvck Hippie faces down overwhelming anxieties and insecurities through endearingly bleary eyed indie rock, dreamy off kilter pop, free jazz interludes, and cathartic freak outs. Basketball Camp is the follow up to the band's promising debut LP If You Feel Alone at Parties, which FLOOD Magazine praised as not only a must-listen, but a must-repeat-listen, many times in a row; a lo-fi, rhythm-and-blues-and-indie, heartbreaking mini-epic about growing up and out and over while blossoming weirdly anew and expressing genuine poetic thought every time you hear it.

Shaw approached their newest record with a freedom and weirdness that manifests itself in a confident genre agnostic journey that seamlessly transitions between twinkly midwest emo guitars, early aughts Lower East Side indie rock, woozy chillwave, spoken word and jazz. With songs structured more like acts in a play than your typical verse / chorus / verse, at every turn the listener comes across something delightfully unexpected. And in a nod to the rich musical history of the band's hometown, and the underappreciated present day artistic scene therein, a choir of Memphis artists contribute their voices to various songs, acting as a storytelling device tying the record's various threads together. That Memphis chorus fittingly closes out the album
in joyful reverie as Shaw expounds upon an apprehensive but hopeful message to anyone listening. I definitely havent made it over the mountain, but Ive gotten higher than Ive ever been so far.