Hippo Campus were sitting in the green room of a sold-out amphitheater show at the start of the Summer of 2023 when they realized they had a problem. Their fourth LP simply wasn’t good enough. Singer Jake Luppen had been listening to the band’s work as they rolled around the country, trying to tease out how much work remained. All of it, he soon decided. The soul wasn’t there, obfuscated by the need to sound sophisticated and the overwhelming ambition to make their best LP ever, a deeper and more profound record that reflected how their lives were changing.So they called an audible. They were going to start over. And three months later, the four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvoused with longtime collaborator Caleb Wright and producer Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas/Mexico border. They gave themselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, to make something to which they could commit at last. Less than two weeks later, they emerged with what they’d given themselves half a decade to make—Flood.The sentiments on Flood are raw, real, and unguarded, a testament to the band dropping preconceptions of how they had to sound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs. They wiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what Hippo Campus or this record needed to be. Still, sophistication lurks in subtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innate shifts that a band of longtime best friends can tap after so much time spent helping to shape one another’s musical language. Flood doesn’t need to tell you it’s important or interesting; it simply is, just by virtue of how it’s written, built, and rendered, a map of what it’s like to feel everything at once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift for Hippo Campus, too, as they exit the traditional label system to issue the album via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run by peers and pals. If you’re working to let go of expectations, why not jettison them all? There’s a bravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit in every song.Early into the endlessly propulsive “Paranoid,” where stunted acoustic strums undergird an inescapable jangle, Luppen asks an existential question: “Is there something waiting out there for us at the finish line?” The band cycles with him through his woes, from the title’s overwhelming worry to notions of dislocation and loneliness. But in the final verse, with his voice breaking through a scrim of distortion, he stumbles upon a new credo: “Wait, I wanna give this life all that I have in me.” That is precisely what Hippo Campus have done with Flood after realizing it doesn’t take a lifetime—or, well, five years—to do just that.