You Are Killing Our Relationship: Uncomfortable Endings Produce Our Happiness - HOPEUROKAY: Review
Review by Lav:
HOPEUROKAY is a hyperpop duo that I had the pleasure of stumbling upon through Twitter. Last year I got the chance to interview them for Ringtone Magazine and while I left that experience excited for what they were going to do next, even I didn't expect it to come this soon. But there's something else I didn't expect about this record, how emotional it gets.
Despite maintaining the occasionally bubbly demeanor and shimmering synth lines of their debut, You Are Killing Our Relationship is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a much more dejected and self-reflective listening experience. Songs on the album like thousand x and fittingly enough insight work to inform a lot of the feelings and real life situations that inform the sound and themes of the record and they're neither light nor casual.
The record gets off to a wonderful start that does a great job of showing how HOPEUROKAY balance their high-energy textural hyperpop style with their newfound emotional weight. Opening track Waiting On A Day To Go Right starts off soft but really kicks into high gear about a minute in. The song really does a great job of presenting the bright and bouncy instrumentation I was expecting to hear going into the album with vocals that match the languished feeling of the lyrics.
Immediately following that is cutthroat a single that's been out for quite a while now which explains why it was already stuck in my head when I put the album on. While pop-punk has clearly always been an influence on the band this is the point where it most feels like they're channeling the refrains and vocal stylings of the genre. At least I thought it was until I heard crying later on the record, whose distortion gives the band a muscle they don't often deploy which makes the connection to pop-punk even stronger.
Further highlights on the record include falling leaves with its glitchy breakdowns that transition into sequences of stuttering beats throughout. They're split up by some really catchy refrains that made it stick out as a favorite of mine right away. mr. darkside reminds me a lot of my favorite HOPEUROKAY song the letdown. It's an every so slightly more reserved version and comparing the two side-by-side is a great way to see how the band changed from one album to the next.
Even tracks here that don't blow me away with their refrains and songwriting are certainly capable of holding my interest with their unpredictable instrumental arrangements. dealbreaker and back2u come back-to-back and show that off perfectly with the former's crashing heavy synth lines and the latter's more distant murmuring demeanor.
You Are Killing Our Relationship is a break-up album but it refuses to be limited to that classification. It's no surprise coming from a band that is so difficult to define in the first place. Thankfully, the shift to something more thematically serious hasn't robbed HOPEUROKAY of their elastic sentimentalities and this record is just as hard to pin down as its predecessor. In a year that's likely to be just as saturated with hyperpop as 2022, this is an early beacon of originality for the style. 7/10
For more hyperpop check out my review of Jimmy Edgar's Liquid Heaven here
