Nai Palm is warm in an eccentric kind of way. She logs onto our zoom call from the other side of the world, settled in at her recently acquired house in a room that is dark but for swirling fluorescent fairy lights that surround her features. The front-woman of era-defining cult favourites Hiatus Kaiyote, who later this month will be sharing their fourth studio album, is one of those humans with added zest in their disposition, a main character aura that feels impossible to question – and who’d want to anyway? Palm, an orphan who survived breast cancer in her 20s who has lived through her fair share of strife, is unassumingly upbeat, her quaint giggle and spritely tone providing reassurance to an interviewer somewhat nervous to be chatting to such an enchanting presence.
“Basically I like to come up with bootleg t-shirt ideas and thought it would look cool on a t-shirt,” she breezes on the formation of the name of Hiatus Kaiyote’s forthcoming record, Love Heart Cheat Code. “It was just something very natural that came from my brain. It means fucking nothing, it just sounds cool to say.” The band’s artist alias itself isn’t too dissimilar in its randomness, simply two words (well, one fake, one real) married eternally by “a bunch of friends at a bar, brainstorming.” Such serendipity is a key characteristic of Palm and her counterparts, a refreshingly lucid outlook on a career in music that, in the current epoch, is somewhat lacking the fun that it once obtained. “I don’t think we really care about the curve,” she remarks. “A lot of people are like, ‘Let’s make a song that’s gonna blow up on TikTok,’ but we’re not that kind of band. It drives our label and our management crazy because they’re like algorithms, content, blah, blah, blah…”
The June 28th-set album is the Aussie jazz outfit’s fourth body of work, and a continuation of the free-flowing creativity that is centric to the band’s process. “We’re very single-minded in that it’s song by song and then when putting an album together with what tracks fit together,” she pinpoints on the lack of over-conceptuality in the Hiatus catalogue. “It’s like micro and macro; you go into these little universes and then you chip away at it and then there’s a whole body of work that reveals itself to you after the fact. We’re never trying to be too intellectual or too anything, you know, it just is what it is and people interpret it. It’s funny because some people love our new shit and then you get people that are like, ‘Oh, their first two records were the ones and now they suck.’ There’s always gonna be that, but we’re not consciously trying to shift our sound to have a response, it’s just like, whatever the fuck it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be.”
Palm, who spent her childhood “constantly moving around and in different homes,” always “wanted to get a band together,” but it wasn’t until bassist and producer Paul Bender saw her play in Melbourne in 2010 that such an odyssey began to catalyse. From there they recruited cultured musicians Perrin ‘Pez’ Moss and Simon Mavin, and embarked on the recording of their seminal debut record, 2012’s Tawk Tomahawk, at the latter pair’s home studio. Unsurprisingly, given the mercurial talent and unique vision that the band has captured since its inaugural days, it didn’t take long for the industry to notice. The cult classic debut provided a launchpad for the group to reach a global audience, and in the years since they have solidified themselves amongst the most revered acts of their generation. Each proceeding LP – 2015’s Choose Your Weapon and 2021’s Mood Valiant – has taken the band past their previous artistic summit, and they have picked up three Grammy nominations on route to a rich musical legacy.
Hiatus is made up of the same four members that it began with; a rare achievement for a band 14 or so years deep. Palm puts their elongated unison down to democracy, loyalty and mutual respect. “They are all really receptive, emotionally intelligent and uniquely individualistic,” she says of her bandmates. “We all adore music and the exploration of that. Everybody’s really emotionally invested in the thing that they contribute to and that’s really fun and really creative. It’s a four-way collaboration; I think ultimately you need people to be equally invested. When you’re the boss of something it’s kind of boring and you’re limited by your brain whereas you can be surprised by how someone interprets something and reacts to it. We’re just constantly building off of different people’s ideas which is why we have so much material and why we’re still really excited to collaborate with each other. There’s natural chemistry and then there’s chemistry that you have to work on; the more comfortable you are with people the more trust you have so you can get weirder with it.”
So is the new record weirder? If stretching their musical limitations and introducing new instruments (a harpsichord, for one, pops up fairly regularly on the new album) means so, then sort of. But simultaneously, Palm remains grounded in her core songwriting process, one that is instinctive, and rebellious against expectation. “It’s fun to go super deep and explore shit and make it weird and contemporary,” she pinpoints. “But it can also be a limitation if you’re just trying to impress people with your wackiness all the time. You lose basic parts of humanity. Often, the more advanced you become as an artist, the simpler your music will become, because there is so much depth to simplicity. Once you set a standard of complexity and intellect, that’s an expectation to keep doing that but most creatives are trying to break out of moulds of expectation. Formulas are useful but should ultimately be abandoned at the end of the day.”
Formula has never been part of the Hiatus manifesto, and the Love Heart Cheat Code is no different. It’s dazzlingly chaotic, splashed with their signature hue from top to bottom. It’s perhaps their most sonically varied project too – just look at the singles: from the soulful idiosyncrasy of “Everything’s Beautiful” to the moody cinema of the title track. It’s the work of a band who are confident in their sound, each other and their views on the industry, but are also looking to dig a little deeper. “No, I’m way too much of a scatter brain to be that organised,” Palm laughs when I enquire about thematic threads. “I’m naturally curious and just love so much about the world, so much different music, film, travelling, languages… I like to get all the way amongst it. So I think when it comes to writing – basically my life goal is whenever I find a limitation in myself to try and shatter that. It’s not like a concept album. For us, we just work on each song and at the end we put them together. I think the thread that ties it together is when we all agree on something. If all four of us think the same, then it’s probably good.”
So with the album’s release date swiftly approaching and a busy year of touring to come (a run in the States will be followed by European dates), how does Nai Palm feel? “To be entirely honest with you, I have this obsession with my morality,” she concludes. “So if I get another album out, I’m just relieved in a way – like thank God I didn’t die before I got through this chapter. Especially when I went through breast cancer; going through that in your twenties is a total fucking reality check. So every time an album is mastered and sent out and the people who can release it have it, I’m like deeply fucking relieved and ready to start the next one. Because it makes you immortal and I love that. I find comfort in that I create things that can continue to interact with other people emotionally. Maybe forever, if I’m lucky.”