No nostalgia, no half measures: The Hellp are here to disrupt, not dwell. The Californian duo sit down with writer Douglas Jardim in Shoreditch, reflecting on their long-awaited debut album LL, and the responsibility of pushing electronic music forward.
“At the end of the day, that is us more or less. We were doing it there, and now we’re doing it here, and we were arrogant then, and we’re arrogant now. We’ve made some bad stuff, we made some really good shit, and some of it’s been universally praised, and some of it should be spat upon. I just am more concerned with the work and the output, and if that’s there then everything else will sort of acquiesce and come into line with that. I think we just have to make better music and just be better artists basically, and that will wash away any ironicism that we have had to feel. I’m kind of a yapper, I can just talk at length forever.”
The Hellp’s Noah Dillon is unpacking the intersection of style and sound. It’s late-February, and the Californian duo have invited me over to their Airbnb in Shoreditch. Our conversation is taking place among a slew of European dates marking the arrival of their highly anticipated debut album LL, following their biggest US headline tour thus far in 2024. Noah and his partner in crime Chandler Ransom Lucy are dressed for the occasion. Just a few hours before they play the second of three sold-out shows at London’s Corsica Studios. It was to be a rainy Friday night, with hordes of enthusiastic Hedi boys and girls lining up to hear ecstatic mixes from the pair, and opener Mowalola. Focus on the disruptive musicality of The Hellp is imperative, but space must be held for the undeniable impact they’ve had on today’s fashion trends. Following this interview, they were spotted sitting front-row at Ann Demeulemeester during Paris Fashion Week. Inevitable, then, that they even DJ’ed the after-party.
We’re all in black leather jackets, although I cannot be mistaken for a slender Hedi Slimane mod cut muse unlike rockstars The Hellp, obviously, in Saint Laurent. They are not, as comments sections have claimed, a product of nostalgia baiting. Both wearing shades indoors, plus matching white tees and black skinny jeans, these indie sleaze staples come naturally to them with an easy confidence. “This isn’t a conscientious bit,” Chandler says, his legs crossed as he munches on shawarma. “I’ve been wearing skinny jeans since I was 13 fucking years old, dude. You live by the game, you die by the game, that’s all it is.” Noah, slumped back on the sofa, reflects on public perception and the recent notoriety of their viral designer jeans from Bosnia. “There was, I guess, some tension thinking about it, but now I just think whatever will pass will pass. If people want to see us like that it’s fine. If they don’t, and they want to see us another way, that’s fine.”
Noah and Chandler both come from god-fearing, working-class households. Noah has lived a thousand lives: the Alexa Demie of rural Colorado, you could say. He grew up hunting, steering construction jobs from the age of seven with his father – ironic considering the persistent noise interruptions of local building work throughout our discussion. He studied physiology in college and was not musically inclined growing up, more so an athlete with a penchant for biomechanics and fine art references that carry through in present projects. At one point, Noah lived in his car for a year. The Hellp was just a pipe dream, at first. Now, he’s “a Yale Poynter Fellow” giving lectures at the institution, alongside Stanford University and Otis College of Art and Design, on his craft as a musician and photographer. “I live a very blessed life, for sure,” Noah tells me. “The things I’ve got to experience, where I come from, that would never happen to anybody else unless you just willed it into existence. I was in some paparazzi photo with the Kardashians and whatnot while I was a substitute teacher, which was crazy.”
Chandler grew up relatively similar in California’s Wine Country, except his parents met at a punk-rock show. Blink-182 were his favourite band, and he hated school. Oh, he also has experience as a model. Chandler joined The Hellp as a drummer and producer the year after the band’s formation in 2015 – initially made up of Noah on vocals, and guitarist Eddie Liaboh, who left in 2018. “We began LARPing as people who could be in a band,” Chandler says, neither of the pair having made music prior. “There’s a way to do that tastefully and sincerely, but at one point we were fucking dickheads who felt really rejected from our hometowns, trying to wear skinny jeans.”
From the get-go, The Hellp set their sights on “trying to be avant-garde in the pop world”. They’ve cited Crystal Castles and A$AP Rocky as core influences, evidenced in the house party hedonism and finger gun gestures of their sonic and visual output. “Being in Amsterdam and Paris, hearing a bunch of kids screaming “California Dream Girl” or “Colorado”, I think blue collar America – what we represent regarding small towns – is ubiquitous,” Chandler says. Noah chips in: “It’s the Freudian thing, you 0-18. You’re trying to recollect what those years meant to you over the rest of your life.” “’Cause I need horses like you need drugs”, he writes in 2021’s “Ssx”.
Through the lens of what Noah describes as “blue collar chic”, the video for 2016 track “Confluence” sees him running down naked in Monument Valley, Arizona. “The school district tried to fire me over that video, I had to unlist it and it was this whole back and forth. People were trying to run me out of town.” It allegedly served as inspiration for Frank Ocean’s Blonde, however. 2017’s Nine Inch Nails-sounding “Beacon 002” was co-signed by Kanye West. “Tu Tu Neurotic” – The Hellp’s biggest streaming song – is “culturally very important”, according to Noah. “People love, live and die for it. It changed every girl’s personality in New York. That was the song that started indie sleaze, unknowingly. It reminds me a lot of Chappell Roan’s “Feminomenon” and “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl”, concept songs on a record or smaller project that don’t completely tie in with the rest. They’re art songs.” Chandler adds: “It’s tastefully camp, like Peaches.”
“We’re founding fathers of the scene,” Noah boldly states. To their credit, it’s a status The Hellp cements on LL, notably on the end of “Ether” – a song that 2hollis has production credits on. “It took a lot of other people releasing music and being inspired by us to validate what we were doing, to further our own vision of what we’re doing. The current zeitgeist right now, maybe we just wanted to put our nail in it.” Despite their electroclash and indie rock legacy, there is cause for concern regarding the commodification of music. “Electronic music, it’s exhausted itself within the last couple of years, for sure,” Chandler expresses. Noah believes that: “We can all feel this collapse of cultural aptitude, we’re in this Warholian era of art and commerce. You see those videos on TikTok of girls with large assault rifles getting blown back at the range and falling over. That’s how most people are weaponising nostalgia. Nostalgia’s a gun, and they are the person getting blown back by it. But if you’re using the right caliber of weapon, it’s very effective.”
Noah admits to “Ssx” being, “clearly, a nostalgia bait song” four years ago, although it still feels authentic today. He describes his process now as “No mood boards, no treatments. We’ve all seen the Rick Owens’ New York Times interview. As soon as you look at references, your brain is fried. I’m very aware of modern music, but I don’t listen to music at all unless I really need to tap in.” LL’s new music is a lot less nostalgic. It’s more like an EP of old ideas crafted into new bangers jam-packed with drums and synth snap – “conceptual, concise and with a very specific style of workflow”. The album’s track list majority, aggressive though heartfelt, speaks to Noah’s obsession with SoundCloud music. “I’m hyper vigilant on the sounds we’re using. Sometimes it’s good to be very pathological and structured and revisionary. And then there’s other times where you kind of go flow-state for a minute. Something beautiful just comes out because it’s your human spirit speaking, as New Age as that might sound.”
LL wasn’t made under the intention of being tasteful and restrained unlike 2021’s “Enemy” EP, – The Hellp’s “best work”, Noah says. With LL, “I would be plugged in to the speakers with our engineer, and I would be spamming splice sounds, just the stupidest shit you’ve ever heard. Trying to fry my brain enough to where that sensibility could be redirected through our way of doing things. I think it was pretty successful in doing that. It feels apropos and in vogue, but it also feels grounded, centred and mature.” Too right it does. “Caustic” explores themes of fleeting youth and strained relationships, employing archival lo-fi footage of a Calabasas High School student’s last day for a captivating visual directed by Noah. “Go Somewhere” tackles the consequences of hedonism, from self-harm and suicide to gun violence and death.
“Halo” is “this transcendent thing,” Noah says. “This ineffable idea, like an angel or a crown, and the beat fees like that too. It’s ascending, sonically speaking. Christian iconography has been used for a multitude of ways, like the perversion way that Ethel Cain is using. Salem makes droning, dark beats. My interpretation of the spectre of Christianity in the Midwest is vistas and mountains and beauty, the tension constantly in between those things. But I’m not really interested in Christianity in our music anymore.” The Hellp tease what to expect on their follow-up record: “No goofy shit,” Noah says. “You’re going up against the greats to make an album. If we can just go 1% Radiohead, make a body of work that will have something to say forever…” “You can’t give someone a sophisticated palette just like that, you’ve got to ease them in,” Chandler adds.
For the pair, making music has never been about simply existing within a scene – it’s about pushing the genre with intention and sacrifice. “If you say you’re in a band, that means so much. The music better fucking be good, and if not, you’re going to hell,” Noah insists. Their journey has been anything but easy, marked by years of self-doubt, near silence, and an unwavering belief that this work should mean something. “I’m just shocked that people even show up now, I mean, we never played shows historically. We barely release music, sometimes for years, and a lot of it was because I was just ashamed of the music.” And yet in this moment, at the precipice of something greater, The Hellp’s purpose is clear. “I just want people to care about things again. People are so faux apathetic and nonchalant. I think you should talk about things with such impassioned voice that you lose it.” Anything less, and they might as well pack it up. But that’s not happening anytime soon.
Listen to LL…
Words – Douglas Jardim
