The leather-jacket-and-skinny-jean-clad duo of Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have been lingering on the fringes of New York and Los Angeles’ pop scenes for a while now. First spotlighted by NME as part of the Dimes Square renaissance back in 2023, The Hellp have since swapped indie-sleaze pastiche for daring introspection. Their days of brash, neon-soaked party energy have been left behind in favour of cinematic electronics that still carry a knowing, self-aware swagger.
Dillon and Lucy began recording as The Hellp in 2016, their early mixtapes steeped in the frantic nights and reckless abandon of NYC indie-sleaze predecessors like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But in recent years, they’ve steadily gathered a much-desired critical respect, not only through their underground shows (including London’s Corsica Studios with support from Fakemink), but also through Dillon’s flourishing visual work, which recently extended to Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and two of 2hollis’ music videos.
In the build-up to ‘Riviera’, the band explained: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” And indeed, the record feels like Dillon and Lucy walking a tightrope between persona and vulnerability, spectacle and sincerity.
The first single, ‘Country Road’ smoulders with a kind of late-night gloom, the sort of confession you make to a friend in the smoking area of a club. Its sense of desperate isolation is wrapped in glitching electronics and a pulsing bridge that hints at the disillusionment from one too many nights out. Moments like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ double down on the “desperate story of the disparate Americana” the duo reference in their liner notes. Both tracks widen the album’s sense of spaciousness and work as sharp reflections on reluctant growing up.
When ‘Riviera’ swerves into ‘Doppler’, there’s suddenly a glimmer of hope in the instrumentals as euphoric synths lift Dillon’s lyrics of longing and heartache into a climactic swell. And in the record’s closing stretch, The Hellp land on something many retired club rats will recognise. The Kavinsky-esque intro of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their earlier influences, while the closer ‘Live Forever’ carries a slow-burning maturity, built around the honest repetition of the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
There’s far less chaos to ‘Riviera’ than anything The Hellp have made before. This newfound reflection is a necessary gamble for a band once built on the charge of a downtown New York revival. By dialling things back, The Hellp have left the party in an afterglowy haze, and re-emerged with a sound that’s sharper and more self-aware than ever.
