We’re halfway into the 2020s, and so far it has been a decade defined by throwbacks — Y2K fashion is coming out of exile, the 90s are making a reappearance, and — for this review — most importantly, 2010s indie sleaze is back with a vengeance. We saw The Dare suddenly emerge as a new artist to follow in 2024, followed by an onslaught of similar — yet not derivative — bands in his wake: Bassvictim, MGNA Crrrta, The Truth, 2hollis — and, most importantly, The Hellp. The Hellp have been around since 2021, making music drenched in muddy synths, angular drumming and glitchy production that creates a musical experience that, yes, harkens back to the indie sleaze artists of the 2010s (LCD Soundsystem, The Strokes and MGMT, to name a few) but is all the same fresh and intriguing. “Riviera” will be the third album the band has released, and it has a lot to live up to: at their best, the musical chaos that so defines The Hellp’s discography is elevated into something beautifully transcendent — but at their worst, the chaotic nature of The Hellp leads to something undefined and messy. “Riviera” is proving to be an album that might not be that simple to define — for better or for worse. 

The song that got me into The Hellp in the first place was, in fact, their most popular track to date: “Ssx.” To this day, I don’t know how to pronounce the song’s title, and, similarly, I find myself unable to articulate what this song means to me. Every aspect of the song feels meticulous and spontaneous at once — fitting for a song about youth — and the lyrics are just specific enough to be cohesive and just vague enough to be mysterious, which fits the band’s persona to a T. “Ssx” is, in my opinion, a microcosm of the band’s oeuvre and their best song to date: vivid, bright, chaotic and melancholic all at once. I mention this because “Riviera” doesn’t have any songs as strikingly affecting as “Ssx,” which might be where it loses some fans along the way. Listening to the album is more of a journey that makes more and more sense the more you listen to it, which isn’t a quality the rest of their discography shares. That being said, “Riviera” has a lot to offer: it’s precise, patient and meticulous and when it hits you, it hits you. 

The album opens with “Revenge of the Mouse Diva” — a good choice, as it appropriately prepares you for the sound that will meet you for the rest of the album. Lyrically, the center of the song is fame and choice: its ephemerality and your agency related to it (“When you live on the Walk of Fame / Don’t forget, you can walk away…”). This is a fairly interesting idea, but The Hellp’s strength has always been their creative production, which does live up to the band’s reputation on this track, in my opinion. “Revenge of the Mouse Diva” begins with a guitar lick that leads into a drop on the drums –- a pattern that more or less carries the song through its two-minute run time, except for the interlude that takes place midway through the music, which again carries you into the initial drum work and guitar melody. It’s a reasonably interesting song that doesn’t get repetitive despite its fairly cyclical melody and a good introduction to the album. 

“Country Road” was one of the singles on “Riviera,” which, in the context of the album, makes a lot of sense. California has always been an important motif for the band: both band members hail from the Golden State, so its continued reappearance in their songs hits hard both as an emotional guiding light and as an opportunity to explore political themes in their music, which they’ve done before in the past. “Country Road” is a good song — it’s catchy, emotional and the production is on point here: the quiet intensity of the drums and synths allows the melody and lyrics to take the spotlight. This decision makes even more sense thematically: “Country Road” sees The Hellp revisiting California once again, looking for home, but to no avail. The themes of unfamiliarity and isolation explored in “Country Road” can be found on nearly every track on “Riviera,” but here they’re more poignant: what happens when you go home and you still feel like you’re not there yet? 

“Pray to Evil” appropriately encapsulates the oxymoronic combination of acoustic and electronic sound that separates “Riviera” from the rest of The Hellp’s discography. In my opinion The plucked guitar that opens the song, paired with a glitchy drum that adds rhythm, remains a fixture throughout the track’s three-minute runtime. In a very Imogen Heap-esque manner, the base guitar and drum remain for the entire song, with the complexity of the production continually increasing until it builds into a sound more familiar to The Hellp. This mix of acoustic and electronic production can be found on the very next song, “Meridian” — which again begins with relatively simple production, escalating into the organized chaos The Hellp is so known for — this time with a repeated piano melody instead of the guitar work found on “Pray to Evil.” Both of these songs feature small interludes, which is a fairly new concept for The Hellp. In this case, the interludes do work — they function as a small break from the main musical idea, giving the song an excuse to build up the return to the chorus and go a bit wild with the production for a bit. The addition of these interludes risk stepping over the very fine line The Hellp has cultivated between organized chaos and complete mayhem, but in the context of the rest of the album, the interludes add to the emotional arc of the tracklist, making a more cohesive album overall. 

The Hellp have cultivated a particular brand through their music, interviews and shows over their career and “Cortt” is an excellent example of The Hellp’s entire persona and ethos in one song: the song opens to a girl with an endearing French accent complaining about the newfound monotony of partylife — of the “Riviera sound” — and turns into a monologue-esque song punctuated by glitchy production that gets more and more intense until the song’s closing. In the same way that Lorde’s “Melodrama” was meant to depict a party from beginning to end, “Riviera” feels similar: it’s the middle of the album now, and the excitement that the beginning of a party holds has given way to exhaustion. This song marks the shift that marks the closing songs of “Riviera” — disillusioned with city life, the band turns to the idea of a “modern man” to paint a picture of what life could be like: simple, efficient and clean, yes, but ultimately empty. Whether or not this is a hopeful song is up to anyone’s guess, but on “Riviera,” it essentially functions as an expansion of the nihilistic themes introduced in “Cortt” — themes that will follow the album till its last track. 

“Here I Am” is a very interesting track on all fronts, especially lyrically. So far, “Riviera” has explored a loss of identity and the accompanying disillusionment with the familiar — even if the familiar is your home. “Here I Am” expands on these ideas, referencing a 1949 Arthur Miller play that explores many of the same themes as “Riviera”: loss of purpose, identity and the idealization of the American Dream — themes that ring especially true in our current political climate. The production feels similar to that of Tame Impala’s-esque, with synths that build atop a staccato drum beat, carrying the song through its similarly staccato vocal line. The overall effect is a more industrial sound that feels new for The Hellp but nonetheless authentic to what they’ve done so far — especially since the comparatively sterilized feel of the first two verses falls into a kickback drum beat accompanied by a whining synth in the background that ties everything together. Like I’ve mentioned before, the habit The Hellp has of combining genres could very easily lead to something disjointed and unsatisfying - but “Here I Am” manages to stand out as a track on its own while still serving as a lead-in to the last track on the album: “Live Forever.”

“Live Forever” is the longest song on “Riviera” and seems to serve as an amalgamation of everything we’ve seen on “Riviera” so far, both lyrically and production-wise. The Hellp have always been proudly young, singing about the emotional turmoil of growing into yourself and out of relationships, of finding solace in crowded parties and of finding peace in the dangerous. “Live Forever” celebrates the magic of youth, but appreciates it as a fundamentally ephemeral experience (“I wanna live forever / forever / I don’t wanna live forever) — an idea that’s always been central to the band’s ethos but one that’s also never been explored in such detail. 

Overall, “Riviera” lives up to the hype of the band’s discography — that being said, The Hellp is aging, and their music is following suit. The themes of nihilism and purposelessness explored on “Riviera” are familiar to the band’s previous work, but on “Riviera,” they’re boosted by the cold, steely production — making for an album that feels as unfamiliar as the idealized California that The Hellp are trying to return to. One could argue that that’s an unavoidable feature of getting older: becoming a nomad for a while as you search for where you belong. The question is if The Hellp’s audience is growing along with them. “Riviera” suggests that this process is not only inescapable but necessary. In other words, the Riviera sound is coming — the question is if we’re ready for it.