Hippo Campus’ fourth LP, Flood, is loaded with reinvention, exploration, and hard work. This kind of innovative output is the result of personal chemistry and friendship that few musical groups possess. It’s no wonder the widely acclaimed Minnesota indie-rock band has surpassed a billion streams between four LPs and six EPs, and performed to sold-out audiences all over the country.  

Over the past five years, Hippo Campus wrote 100-plus songs and clocked countless hours of recording work with their longtime collaborator and producer Caleb Wright. Eventually, they scrapped everything and started the recording process over with Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch in North Carolina. Flood was ultimately recorded in just 10 days.

While their music continues to mature, Flood delivers the familiar, intricate melodic riffs and hooks that are quintessential to the band’s aesthetic.  

The band performed three new songs at The Current and chatted with us about their recent endeavors and how “their best record yet” came to fruition.

Catch Hippo Campus headlining First Avenue on Thursday, Oct. 3 (a rescheduled date), and Surly Brewing Festival Field with Minnesota-bred, Brooklyn-based shoegaze/alt-rock band Hotline TNT on May 31, 2025.

Transcript edited for clarity and length.

Diane: You all have had such a busy year so far, playing shows all over the country. Tell me about some highlights.

Nathan Stocker: First one that jumps out to me is Summerfest [in Milwaukee]. During a festival season, it can be a lot just hopping from town to town, being a part of a different buffet in subsequent towns. And Summerfest was raining by the time we went on stage, and we had rehearsed the day before. And I don't know, everything just kind of came together in that moment. And it felt really fresh and grounding, and it had been a while since we felt that way. The crowd was great too, obviously. 

Zach Sutton: We just played a festival called Day In Day Out in Seattle, and it was right underneath the Space Needle — not even close to space. But we saw there was this band that played before us, Les Savy Fav ... They blew my hat off. It's just a lot of crowd work. The guy was running around pouring water on everyone. What about you? Favorite show? 

Jake Luppen: I would agree with Summerfest. I've recently taken to playing shows sober, which there's been a learning curve But it's been fun. Summerfest felt like OG Hippo days, like, 2016, just coming out and playing for people and enjoying it at its most base level. 

Sober now, without any things to take the edge off. Has that been a little bit more tricky? 

JL: I think I'm a pretty shy person, so I think alcohol helped me be in front of a lot of people and not think about it too much. So there's been an adjustment. I think it's been four or five shows now to just being completely present and open in that space, but we're starting to figure it out. And there is more joy when it's good, it's really good. When it's bad, it's really bad. But at least I'm feeling things now in a very intense way. It doesn't feel numbed out. 

"Everything at Once" — that makes me think of that. That's a potent phrase to me. Because you’re musicians. You’re creative brains. So you have a lot going on up here in the hippocampus. Explain to me more about that single and that title. 

NS: I think "Everything at Once" was sort of a reckoning for us. It was like a moment in time where things were getting more and more serious on a mortal level. And I think we internalized that, and it felt like a call to really buckle up and get down to business. At that point in the writing process too, which was over a year, year and a half ago, at this point. And it became this sort of rallying call, this home base song that we'd always go back to and find different nuggets that would pertain to wherever we were at the moment. And I think it's just a song that is kind of like, “Here we are. Whatever comes our way, we're gonna have to deal with it, and sift through everything all at the same time.” And that became the mantra. So, at this point, I think it's still kind of a more somber song. But it's been fun to play it live at these festival dates and find some more energy in it that we hadn't expected to find. 

The more you become a band ... it's already been over 10 years now. Maybe the pressure of putting out more music or the music industry probably can all feel like a lot. 

NS: Oh yeah. I mean, even beyond the music industry, obviously. It's like the music industry has become so secondary, on the ladder. It seems like, socially, it just feels like music is slipping and slipping into an oblivion of non-meaning.

JL: I think as things move that way too, we've gotten a lot more inward and introspective with our writing over time. When we first started, it was very outward, and we were confronting these big ideas that we really knew nothing about, just kind of a blind ignorance and confidence. And as the band has rolled on, we've definitely gotten more internal with our writing and more internal with our process in general. We were very isolated writing the record. And I think it let us express a lot of those internal feelings and deal with a lot. 

Tell me about the merger with Sylvan Esso's Psychic Hotline.

JL: That sort of pairs with the internal thing. We were on Grand Jury Records for all of our career up to this point, basically since we were 19. And we went out and talked to some labels and experimented with the idea of taking a more major route. But I think with Hippo, it's always felt right to just keep things as internal and patient as possible. We've always moved at our own pace, which is very Midwestern — slow and natural. So Psychic made sense because Martin Anderson, who's our manager who also manages Sylvan Esso, runs that label. So it's just the most "in the family" that we can get. And they've been great so far. We trust them, and I think they trust us. They let us be us and let them do what they need to do. It just feels like kind of homey and natural to us.

Also want to add congratulations, Jake.

JL: Oh, thank you.

You and Raffaella.

JL: Got engaged.

ZS: Popped the question. 

JL: Popped the question, did the old thing?

Well, we love her music here, too.

JL: She's the best. 

And I know she's an influence on your music as well. Tell me a little bit more about how you two influence one another artistically. Because you're both pop singers, and you've helped produce her music too, as well.

JL: I mean, lyrically, she's a genius. Coming from New York, she has a very intellectual approach to writing. Whereas my approach is very primal. Sort of like, if the words feel good coming out of my mouth – that's kind of my first approach. I think Raff has really influenced my lyric writing in the way where, now, I try and have a thesis or try to go in with an idea. She definitely helps keep me on the tracks, and challenges me, like, "What are you saying with this?" So overall, she's done so much for me as a writer.

Two years ago, you released LP3. What are some of the reflections that you have — having toured on LP3, and maybe even going into the new record? 

ZS: When we were making LP3, it was our most perhaps confident and brazen, in the studio sense and the songwriting sense. We had been pushing our own boundaries of what we wanted to say with our production, with the songs, with everything. And that was off the heels of — during COVID. We kind of wrote and finished that and had to sit on it for a while to have it come out and then be able to tour on it, and kind of have the whole mechanism work together. So I think when we were touring on that, we were forced to look at the reflections of what that brazen process meant for us. And I think we looked at the shows and the feeling that we all kind of had coming off of that as, okay, wow. That was the furthest we had been as a group together, in experimentation and everything. So I think our natural response to that was to sort of reel it back in a little bit. Try to answer what is Hippo Campus right now? Is it brazen? Is it really personal? Is it intimate? And I think that's what's informed everything. The songwriting, the production, the whole ethos of the next chapter for us is sort of like taking it home, opening the blinds again, and just saying, "Okay, this is what it is, and this is where we start again. 

Tell me more about some of the inner workings of this new record.

NS: We recorded it at Sonic Ranch, where we recorded Landmark, our first record, with Caleb Wright and Brad Cook.

ZS: The process, it was one that we decided to distill very heavily, control each variable the best we could. I think, coming back from LP3, which was very experimentation heavy, we decided to sort of hit the theory — the on-paper stuff first, a little bit harder, have a trajectory, take your aim, and then try to hit it. And so we were very patient with each song, each iteration of the production. We wanted to explicitly say this is exactly what we meant and intended to mean. So, we were very patient with the songwriting. We wrote for over two years, at least. We were very patient with the production. We recorded each of these songs at least five times. Some I don't like, forget it. We recorded, like, 10 times. And that was a very taxing process. We got to the halfway point and were like, "Did we suck the life out of this thing? We should have been winging this a little bit more.” There's no crevice to be surprised by anymore. There is no mystery. 

And so we decided to go to Sonic Ranch near the end of the process with Brad Cook. We've been working with Caleb Wright the whole time. We said, “I think we need to get a change of pace in our scenery.” So we decided to go to Sonic Ranch with Brad Cook and just start from square one. Start everything over again. Record each one, and then you kind of leave saying, “That's that.” No more tweaks, no more edits.

NS: No listening to takes.

ZS: Yeah, you're done. So we went to Sonic Ranch. We had two weeks there, and it was like a radical trust sort of thing. It's like, we get this right, and you have to live with it. So at the end of the process, whether you wanted something to change or not, you had to look at it and say, “That's that.” And I love that. And that's what we ended up with, which it is, to me, a very loving product. It's something that I do love because of each ounce of effort that we poured into. But a lot of work, and it wasn't fun.

A labor of love. Jake, every record, I'm reminded how you have this very gymnastic (voice). You morph a lot. And you have this fabulous falsetto. And you were trained in opera?

[Laughs]

JL: I was, yeah, but we've gotten far, far away from that.

[Your voice] is a defining element of Hippo Campus' music. 

JL: I think my voice has just always been pretty weird. And I just have had to figure out what it is. I mean, I sang a lot when I was younger, when my voice was really high, before my voice changed. So I was always just pushing my voice to the limits. And my voice changed, and I still wanted to stay in that territory, but it just felt way crazier. So, I don't know, with each record, I feel like I'm trying to figure out different things I could do with it. With LP3, it was a lot of affecting it in crazy ways, production-wise. Live, now, I use two mics. There's a few songs where I'll use hard auto-tune or format shifting. 

I just get bored pretty easily. So honestly, I try to just shake it up as much as I can and see what comes out. At this point in my life, I feel the most confident with it in terms of — I'm down to push it and take risks. With this record, I really wanted to sing high and loud again, because that was so fun when we were younger. And I just got in my head, I think, over the past few records. And I wanted to have things be more intimate and subdued, which is cool. It was great to learn that. But I don't know, it's a broken, weird, flawed instrument. But I try and do the best I can with it.

I've always wondered this — what is the halocline? What is the significance? I know it was a single, but you have stuck with it for your [screen name]. But I'm curious about how it continues to live on through your branding. 

ZS: Great question.

NS: I'd say that there's little to zero application on a daily basis now for that. But when we were starting the band, it was a metaphor for adulthood, for growing up. A halocline is an aquatic phenomenon where you're in a cave, underwater cave, and you're swimming around, doing your thing, you look up, and it looks like you can see the surface, but it's actually just a thinner layer of water … But now, you get used to something. It was modeled after a band that we really looked up to called WU LYF. And now it's like, do what you will with it, sort of thing. 

ZS: And it was the only available Instagram handle at the time. 

JL: Hippocampus was taken.

ZS: We didn't have the funds to go find whoever had that — offer them some money. 

NS: Or the ambition.

ZS: We were happy with feigning some loose, cryptic —

JL: It probably only really had a negative impact on our career. 

NS: It's literally just confusing, not anything else. 

[Laughs]

You all have been classmates since high school and collaborators, and you write together. Jake, you're the leader of the band as the lead vocalist. But I feel like all you all play such a role in how the music is shaped, and you bring your own levels of creativity. You're a band. It's not just one person with a backing band behind them. I'm curious how all of you work through some of your collaboration, creativity building.

JL: It's always been a really democratic process for us from the get-go. We idolized bands growing up … WU LYF, Little Comets, and Bombay Bicycle Club. And when we were coming up, there were a lot more bands, and now there really isn't that. We're kind of on an island out here hanging out for the most part. But yeah, I think the contentment of the team is always important. We compromise a lot. We've had to do a lot of work, interpersonally, to get to that point. But I think success feels so much better when you're sharing it with your friends. We're best friends still, and we have been. It's like family at this point. So when you lose, you have people there to lose with you, which is special. And when you win, you win together. So as cheesy as that is, I think it's a beautiful thing. I think everything tastes sweeter if you do it with your friends.

ZS: For better, for worse, we do prioritize that democratic process. And there are a million examples of when someone is let down, of when someone doesn't get what they want. It feels like the whole concept, the whole product, is compromised because you're meeting in the middle instead of doubling down and really forging some way forward. But we've tried having a de facto leader, or just an executive choice being made. And I think it's led to more issues than rewards. It keeps coming back to - it needs to be this group of people with equal share. We all say we will do this for the rest of our lives. And I think if anything were to change in terms of one person stepping forward or stepping out, it would be much harder to think about this conceptually for the long term.

Thank you so much, Hippo Campus. It's been wonderful. Chatting with you – favorite here on The Current station-wide and, of course, on The Local Show. Minnesota pride. 

ZS: Thank you for having us.