It was a sad day when Hooray for Earth announced that they’d be calling it quits with the release of their third full-length Racy back in 2014. After a decade together crafting vivid, futuristic, and totally unique landscapes through thick textures of synth and guitar, bandleader Noel Heroux quickly went on to re-establish himself with the Sub Pop–signed Mass Gothic, which also went quiet after releasing their second album back in 2018. Yet since then, HFE’s Bandcamp page has seen new uploads (most recently a live album created from a pair of 2022 tour stops opening for Modest Mouse), including the group’s self-titled debut and early EP Cellphone, both of which had previously been hard to come by before the digital resuscitation.
Meanwhile, their landmark second LP True Loves has been unavailable on vinyl for quite some time, with the band returning today with its first-ever reissue of the 2011-released project. “The opportunity arose to do a vinyl release with Bandcamp and I thought, ‘Alright, True Loves has been out of print for several years, I can do something about this!’” Heroux shares. “The reissue edition is designed following sketches I originally drafted (and were not used) for the album artwork back in 2011, a tiny but very welcome catharsis for me.”
Arriving with that reissue is a previously unreleased single from the True Loves sessions called “La Que,” which immediately recalls the band’s glossy peak, but wasn’t quite ready to be released by the time the album had come together. “I went through several old external drives to rescue stems and revisited fragmented lyrics to make it whole,” Heroux adds. “The song is something of a love/war episode with myself and an absolutely tireless inner critic.”
As for the band’s future, he mentions a project that’s been in the works for some time, but which has only recently been designated HFE material. “It was—and is—called ‘Fantasy Something,’” he explains, “and it’ll have a release date soon. I’m producing and mixing records for other artists and continuing to explore what I can do with music, Hooray for Earth and elsewhere.
While he shares little more in the way of detail, we do get one nugget of how family life has shaped the new material: “I’ve taken to replacing tambourines and the like with my child’s jingly toys.”
Hear the new (to us) single below, and check out the True Loves reissue here.
