The title Mood Valiant, for starters, is a tribute to her mum. I wanted to celebrate with an experience, as we’ve been a band for 10 years and we’ve evolved together.Saalfield says her late mother, a dancer who performed with the Australian Ballet Company, was on her mind throughout the making of the album because of what she was going through. “First, though, it’s my birthday tomorrow and we’re all going skydiving. “It’ll be great to be back playing and we have a show coming up in a few days,” Saalfield says. I just want to be a studio rat that’s where we thrive most.”Īs the world tentatively reopens, the band are embarking on a small Australian tour. “Bender likes to quote that art is never finished, it is only abandoned, but all I know is that I would have lost my mind if we didn’t have that studio to go to. “Did it take the pandemic for us to finish our record?” Saalfield playfully asks. One other room in particular – bass player Paul Bender’s home studio – also proved key for survival when Covid hit. Verocai’s luscious strings and punchy horns are interwoven into several tracks, while Red Room was also written during the same evening session. Key to the record is the musical input of the 75-year-old Brazilian arranger Arthur Verocai (a “cheeky genius”, according to Saalfield), who tracked the string and horn sections with the group in Rio de Janeiro. From the string-laden joy of the lead single Get Sun to the raw introspection of the aforementioned Red Room, and the clattering groove of Chivalry Is Not Dead – featuring lyrics riffing on the mating rituals of leopard slugs – Mood Valiant is both spacious and ebullient. The result is 12 tracks that, in typical Hiatus Kaiyote fashion, defy easy categorisation but are tied together by the warmth of Saalfield’s vocal harmonies. It has a gorgeous righteousness to it and we want people to feel valiant and beautiful, regardless of what mood they’re in, when they experience the music.” Usually it was the white one, but if she drove the black one you knew not to mess with Mom on that day,” Saalfield laughs. Depending on her mood, she would drive one or the other. “She used to have two Valiant Safari station wagons – one was white and one was black. The album title also references Saalfield’s mother’s fierce presence as a single parent of six. Since I use music as a vehicle to process emotions, she emerged as a strong theme in the record.” “My mother died of breast cancer so it was intense to experience something she had gone through. “We’re just nerds who make weird music,” Saalfield says with a smile, “so it’s amazing to see people like Drake playing our track at a stadium show in Australia it shows that you never know where your music is going to end up, or the meanings that it will have for other people.”įor Saalfield, whose cancer diagnosis brought up emotions from her past that she had never confronted before, music provided an outlet. These beat-flips exposed their niche, noodling jazz and soul-referencing music beyond crate-diggers and their fellow musicians to a more mainstream audience – and came as quite a surprise. They also arrived in the midst of a hectic touring schedule, as Hiatus Kaiyote saw a spike in popularity after several of their tracks were sampled by hip-hop royalty including Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z. These losses came as Saalfield’s four-piece band were crafting new music for Mood Valiant, the follow-up to 2015’s acclaimed Choose Your Weapon. Sometimes the only thing that can really heal you is music.” It’s a blessing to have the arts as a vehicle to process it. “But loss is not a new thing to me I’m an orphan and I’ve experienced a lot of death in my life. I had lost a breast and then I lost my bird, who I went everywhere with for almost a decade,” she says. Speaking over a video call from her home in Melbourne, her shock of blond hair bursting through the darkness of the room, Saalfield stoically recounts how the global pandemic was just the latest development in several years of bad news: namely, a breast cancer diagnosis, mastectomy and the death of her beloved rescue bird, Charlie.
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