Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley (White Fence) have teamed up for a second album as DRINKS. The new album, Hippo Lite, is out now on Drag City worldwide. DRINKS began in 2015 with the release of their debut LP, Hermits on Holiday on Presley’s own Birth Records. Today they’ve announced three special live shows to take place in September in NY, LA, and SF.
TOUR DATES:
09/21 Brooklyn, NY – Market Hotel
09/27 San Francisco, CA – The Chapel
09/29 Los Angeles, CA – Pico Union Project
What the press has been saying about Hippo Lite:
“Hippo Lite is an album of peculiar grace: a mini-odyssey in quiet post-punk experimentation brought to life with playfulness, eccentricity, and sly compositional sophistication. Madcap ideas are caught in mind-warping feedback loops. Batshit humor is mixed with the heart-tugging beauty of lovely, fingerpicked ballads. Atonal strings are lit up by strands of clever melodies, sung alternately by Le Bon or Presley. All of Hippo Lite’s strange sounds—a baby crying, a typewriter, a creaking door, ribbiting frogs, an inspired shaker—make it sound like a dada sound collage assembled in secret. For every classical element, there is a punk guitar, rudimentary beat, or wonky shout. Things that are “right” are constantly complicated by things that are “off.” Once you spend enough time inside the fragmented world of Hippo Lite, you’ll be caught wondering which is which.” – Jenn Pelly, Pitchfork
“An absorbing and clever (album) that gets stranger as it goes on. The ornate, cascading piano melodies in ‘Corner Shops’ demand a microscope to see exactly how they’re knitted together, while ‘Real Outside’ uses a needling guitar and the kind of lurching violin last heard on the Raincoats’ debut album to create a strange, ritualistic two-step that suggests the rules of some lost game.” – Laura Snapes, The Guardian
“‘Corner Shop’ clicks multiple miniature gears into place like an antique watch — a trebly and discordant guitar riff plays off a plinked piano ascending broken scales, and an oddball funk bass and clipped metronomic rhythm keeps everything in place.” – Lars Gotrich, NPR
“Free of outside influence, Le Bon and Presley’s work feels reflexive, channeling a stream of shared consciousness governed by instinct.” – Ian Thomas, FLOOD
“A beautifully strange bit of primitivistic post-punk” – Peter Helman, Stereogum
“Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley (White Fence, Darker My Love) have each made some skronky, esoteric music in their respective careers, but never so willfully weird as when they work together as Drinks.” – Bill Pearis, Brooklyn Vegan
Press photo by H. Hawkline
DRINKS
Hippo Lite
(Drag City)
Street Date: April 20, 2018
Buy it here
Track List:
1. Blue From The Dark
2. IF IT
3. Real Outside
4. When I Was Young
5. In the Night Kitchen
6. Greasing Up
7. Corner Shops
(side break)
8. IF IT… (reprise)
9. Ducks
10. Leave The Lights On
11. Pink or Die
12. You Could Be Better