LISTEN: The Mother Hips Lock & Load On Loose “When We Disappear”

Nine months after 2021’s Glowing Lantern sessions, the wax still warm on the vinyl presses, The Mother Hips moved from their digs at 25th Street Recorders in Oakland, California, and were headed to Jono Manson’s Kitchen Sink Studio in New Mexico to begin work on their next LP, When We Disappear. This is a rapid progression of events for this band and certainly the quickest recording turnaround in its thirty-year history. The result is a continuance of energy that flows from one release to the next.

It is more than fair to say that The Mother Hips have found themselves firmly in a creative renaissance over the past year and a half. The juices are most definitely flowing and getting into the studio and executing ideas and fragments – seeing them fleshed out and fully realized in song is clearly a priority. The proof we have of all of this is a new single, the title track from their twelfth studio effort, “When We Disappear.” The entire album release will be on January 27th, 2023.

The single itself is as pure Hips as we have ever known them. Tim Bluhm and Greg Loiacono blending their voices, a-la Everly Brothers, is awesome but the song gains its swagger from the repeating guitar motif augmented by bombastic (in the best sense) piano laid down by keyboardist Danny Eisenberg. The track is grounded by the most solid of rhythm sections composed of John Hofer on drums and Brian Rashap on bass. This is not your intricate Hips song – not even close. It stumbles into your ear like a drunk buddy and dances in there for a bit.

Of the track, Tim Bluhm said, “Greg [Loiacono, co-founder] sent me a rough demo of this song and I checked it out; I thought it was promising. What he was singing was place-holder gibberish or sounds mixed with some actual lyrics, including what would become the title. I went through it and matched words to his sounds and then tweaked the words to tell a kind of impressionistic history of our adventures together. In this way I believe both Greg’s and my own subconscious worlds revealed themselves. We agreed that I should sing the lead, but the B section melody was too high for me so we switch lead on that part and then fall into unison for emphasis on the refrain. The music is simple and loose, helping with the devil-may-care attitude of the singing.”

You can go listen to the new single on any streaming platform or listen below.