Devendra Banhart, Gyan Riley, and Noah Georgeson aren't related -- but ask them and they'll tell you otherwise. "They're my brothers, my family," Devendra says. "It's irrevocable." Listen to HUG and you'll understand why: what could read as a guitar trio on paper turns into something stranger and warmer in practice, three old friends finishing each other's musical sentences.
The record came together fast, three weeks, no grand plan, but the roots go back decades, long before any of them sat down to write it. One loop on the closing track started as a fragment Noah and Devendra dreamed up twenty years ago in Venice Beach, shelved and forgotten until this album gave it a home. Elsewhere, field recordings carry the trio even further: a hillside in India, a river running through Venezuela and Colombia. Even the album's most chant-like moment, "Sarva Mangalam," turns out to be a joke hiding in plain sight -- its lyrics are just a Sanskrit greeting paired with the Spanish words for condensed milk.
Catch HUG live on November 18: instrumental, experimental, and built entirely on the kind of trust you can't fake.
