The sinewy 'Yippie Ki Yay' might be the outlier in its energy, in its anthemic encapsulation of loneliness. '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.

'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. '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. The EP is adventurous, and runs the gamut of genre, but the hook-laden songwriting and weirdo pop peeks through. 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. With this EP, they capture the energy of the five of them playing live in a room. 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. It marks a new chapter for the band - embracing simplicity and hands-off, pared-back production. The songs were written mainly in Minneapolis, then recorded at Asheville's Drop of Sun studios. 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. Early Hippo Campus records wanted to be cerebral, heady, to use poetic language and obscure their feelings - now, they want to be understood. Nearly a decade into being a band, Hippo Campus still embraces and is guided by the ethos of shaking it up, sonically or otherwise.

They've always embraced the ride, the good and bad, trudging through together, and Wasteland is the most honest version of that. 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. 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. The five songs collected on Wasteland are totems of friendship, hardship, heartbreak, and, ultimately, perseverance. 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 storytelling on Hippo Campus' new EP, Wasteland, is set against a dystopian, painterly backdrop, fragments of humanity lingering at the edges of the end.

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