First Avenue presents Hippo Campus with Miloe and Papa Mbye at Bayfront Festival Park in Duluth, Minn., on Saturday, June 24.

Doors 5 p.m. | Show 6:30 p.m. | All Ages | Rain or Shine

MORE INFORMATION

Public on-sale Friday, Feb. 24, at 10 a.m.; The Current’s presale on Thursday, Feb. 23, at 10 a.m. (see details below)

How to receive presale information

A presale is scheduled for Thursday, February 23, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. (the public on-sale opens Friday at 10 a.m.). Subscribe to Cross Currents — The Current’s weekly newsletter — by midnight Wednesday, February 22, to receive details about this week’s presale for Hippo Campus, Miloe and Papa Mbye at Bayfront Festival Park in Duluth.

 You must be 13 or older to submit any information to Minnesota Public Radio. The personally identifying information you provide will not be sold, shared, or used for purposes other than to communicate with you about things like our programs, products and services. See Terms of Use and Privacy.

Hippo Campus

The storytelling on Hippo Campus’ new EP, Wasteland, is set against a dystopian, painterly backdrop, fragments of humanity lingering at the edges of the end. On the horizon, a tornado-like entity looms - and instead of turning away, we go forward, plunging into the storm of unknown, and remaining somehow hopeful, in spite of it all.

The five songs collected on Wasteland are totems of friendship, hardship, heartbreak, and, ultimately, perseverance. It’s dispatched from an unnamed disaster spread out across the Midwestern plains; the band was heavily inspired by country music, the way that songwriting gets straight to the point, and using that straight-forwardness, imagery, and dark humor as a vehicle for talking about the grief, loss, and love they’ve collectively experienced in the past year.

Since the very beginning, with their debut album, 2017’s Landmark, to 2022’s LP3, Minneapolis’ Hippo Campus -- made up of vocalist/guitarists Jake Luppen and Nathan Stocker, drummer Whistler Allen, bassist Zach Sutton, and trumpeter DeCarlo Jackson – have tried to make sense of the world around them. They’ve always embraced the ride, the good and bad, trudging through together, and Wasteland is the most honest version of that. Nearly a decade into being a band, Hippo Campus still embraces and is guided by the ethos of shaking it up, sonically or otherwise. Early Hippo Campus records wanted to be cerebral, heady, to use poetic language and obscure their feelings – now, they want to be understood.

Wasteland was recorded with longtime friend and collaborator Caleb Wright (Samia, Miloe, Baby Boys), and is the first batch of new music from Hippo Campus since the release of LP3. The songs were written mainly in Minneapolis, then recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studios. It marks a new chapter for the band – embracing simplicity and hands-off, pared-back production. LP3 and Good Dog, Bad Dream skewed more experimental and glitchy, maximalist and unpredictable, but here the band wanted to get back to the core of their songs. With this EP, they capture the energy of the five of them playing live in a room. The demos seamlessly flowed into the final product – Hippo Campus wanted the way they felt while recording to be immediately accessible to anyone who listened, so they embraced simplicity.

The EP is adventurous, and runs the gamut of genre, but the hook-laden songwriting and weirdo pop peeks through. “Moonshine” is a post-apocalyptic indie-country love song, written by Luppen and his partner Raffaella; it’s about falling in love with a world on fire, a final Tennessean sunset, deceptively upbeat. “Probably,” a spacious and low-key ballad was recorded in just three takes and is acoustic guitar-forward, while “Kick in the Teeth” feels more psychedelia-imbued. “Honeysuckle,” also known as honeyberry, is a plant that can endure extreme winter conditions – and is the song that directly addresses the hardship of perseverance most directly, a distillation of the idea that canopies across the whole EP.

The sinewy “Yippie Ki Yay” might be the outlier in its energy, in its anthemic encapsulation of loneliness. It’s a sprawling, cinematic track powered by propulsive drumming, high energy, and penned as a full group. Built on a guitar riff that had originally floated around as an idea during their Landmark era but didn’t make the album, the final version today is the sort of song the band would’ve only dreamed of writing at the beginning of their career. Now, all these years later, it's an exciting encapsulation of Hippo at what they do best – of a band operating at the height of their powers.

Miloe

The story of Miloe begins in the pews of a church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Where Bobby Kabeya's family would congregate every Sunday was a place where community and rhythm entwined. Every week as parents sang in the choir, Kabeya remained transfixed by the percussion section's ability to keep the entire congregation on its feet. When he and his three younger brothers would return home, they'd turn to the warm enveloping sounds of everything from rumba to reggae, genres championed by nineties Afropop stars such as Papa Wemba, Lokua Kanza, and Lucky Dube.

The sonic imprint of those days in the Congo stayed palpable when the Kabeyas made the 7000 mile journey to Minneapolis to join their father, who had been granted asylum three years prior. Suddenly dropped into the land of such punk legacies as Husker Dü, The Replacements, and Soul Asylum and Prince, Bobby's musical destiny had perhaps unwittingly been cut out for him. Almost immediately he joined his high school band as a percussionist, fashioning its utility closet as a makeshift practice space for the first iterations of his own band to jam out. Midway through high school, he began producing his own material as Miloe, a name cheekily abstracted from Coldplay's indie-pop behemoth Mylo Xyloto.

While working his way through the Twin Cities' basement show circuit, Kabeya chipped away at Miloe's debut EP, releasing a handful of iterations of the low-fi project before landing on a final version in 2019. After a member of Beach Bunny discovered his music, Miloe was asked to open for the skyrocketing Chicago band at a Minneapolis gig. His performance caught the eye of audience member Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus, who offered to help produce Kabeya's next project. A marathon three-day studio session with Luppen transformed a handful of demos Kabeya had stashed away into the Greenhouse EP, which was eventually released in October 2020. The project showcased a sunnier, pop-oriented side to Miloe. He nabbed a hit with lead single "Winona," which was later gilded with vocals from Jamila Woods and Vagabon on a 2021 remix.

Though Kabeya wasn't able to properly tour the project upon its release, his creative momentum remained in perpetual motion. Catalyzed by having his own space for the first time, he began to write his new project Gaps with the intention of bridging the funk-rock inclinations of Minneapolis with the ebullient Congolese sounds of his upbringing. What resulted is songs that magnify his idiosyncrasies while prioritizing the groove: "I wanted to make something that would make me dance, that would generate new energy," he says of the project's buoyant lead single "where u are."

Gaps stays heavily syncopated and expertly textured across its six tracks, often achieved by utilizing his immediate means, such as plucking his Acoustasonic to emulate marimba or incorporating the sound of his neighbor's wind chimes as heard through his bedroom window at 4AM. It's a stop on the journey, but Kabeya also sees it as a flow state. "It's a place where music can take you, where time isn't really a construct and you can zone into this meditative state of jamming. It's a gap, of sorts. A different realm."

Papa Mbye

When Papa Mbye was a teenager he’d go to the park, set up shop, and draw caricatures for willing passerby. It was a hustle, but the mischievous exaggeration also provided a much-needed valve. He had been raised to be quiet and dutiful since his family had immigrated from The Gambia/Senegal to North Minneapolis when he was two years old. But Papa was an eccentric at heart; an artist. He eventually turned his efforts inward, creating his own extended cartoon universe full of irreverent characters that were something like if the child of Kara Walker and Jean-Michel Basquiat was the creative director of Mad Magazine.

He had grown up listening to the music his parents played, like the Senegalese artist N’dongo Lo, and supplemented it with '80s alt-rock, 2000s pop, UK Drum and Bass and increasingly the sound coming from the burgeoning DIY Rap and R&B scene in the Twin Cities. Rapping was a natural progression for a cartoonist within his generation and with his sensibility. After all, it’s a culture full of larger-than-life personalities crafting exaggerated superhero-esque backstories, and a genre whose musicians are often more than just musicians but auteurs aspiring to aesthetic world-building through illustration, clothing, and film.

That breadth of influence is on display on MANG FI, Papa’s post-everything, shape-shifting debut EP completed not more than a year after he laid down his first track. Over six songs, his vocal and production tendencies go every which way, from the middle of the mosh pit yelps and chest-thumping shit talk to distorted melodramatic electro garbles and breezy loverboy crooning. It’s disjointed art-rap, impressively walking the jagged edge between the familiar and the esoteric. Like the best caricature artists do, Papa Mbye pays homage to the source material, while showing us something we’ve never seen before.