Album Review: Lupin – 'Lupin'
You only get one chance at a first impression – For Jake Luppen that’s not quite true. Having spent the past seven years touring the world, fronting indie outfit Hippo Campus, we now get to meet him again, for the first time, on solo project ‘Lupin’.
‘Lupin’, more than anything, is an exploration of Jake Luppen’s inner world. To mesmerizingly atmospheric soundscapes that range from beat-driven grooves and sharp guitar lines to delicate blows to the heart, Jake openly explores the struggles that have followed him around the world. “With this record I wanted to get to the point, and say how things were, as opposed to dancing around them,” he explains and stays true to his word. Each of the LP’s eight tracks is honest to the bone, his poignant lyricism not shying away from topics that may previously have been uncomfortable or intimidating. ‘Vampire’, for example, was written after a CT scan revealed an abnormal mass on Jake’s brain, leaving him under the impression he was dying. Hidden beneath stacks of bubbling synths and a healthy dose of 80s nostalgia, his golden vocals are eerily calm as he sings: “You want me to go back to your room. Well lie to me, I’ll lie to you. I think the jig will be up soon. But can it wait ‘til the morning?”
Another outstanding offering is funky fever dream ‘K-O Kid’ - a groove-infused track that, as Jake reveals, alludes “to the night I told my girlfriend at the time about my attraction to a non-binary friend. I’ve spent most of my life repressing my attraction to people that didn’t identify as women, so I wrote the idea of the KO KID-character as a way to fight those inhibitive and self-imposed judgments.” It’s this kind of brave vulnerability and emotional depth that make the record such an important, highly relevant, piece of music. It’s an ode to authenticity, a statement of intent and a glorious fuck you to a society that bullies people into repressing their truth.
Jake’s solo LP captures the sound of his heart, of his soul. For the first time in a long time, he was in charge with full creative control. “I feel like for a number of years I lost touch with what I wanted,” he reveals. “I was thinking about other people for so long, this was the first chance to be asked, ‘What do I want?’ It was just fucking empowering to be faced with those questions.” With nothing and no-one but himself to please, ‘Lupin’ defies genres and redefines sound as we know it. Warped, subtly distorted basslines weave through the record like an invisible string, tying together the musings of a mad genius. The undeniably chaotic energy of penultimate track ‘Gloomy’ best illustrates the brilliant mind that is Lupin. Tumultuous percussions layered over wobbly, synth-coated melody lines (that climax in a giant explosion) reflect Jake’s frail state of mind and are a testament to his incredibly detailed take on songwriting.
If we can learn anything from Jake Luppen’s ‘Lupin’, it’s to always be true to ourselves - to embrace every weird quirk, every insane notion. “I spent a lot of time thinking I had to hide behind other people or other things, but I realized, ‘No, I’m fully capable of doing this myself, I’m fully capable of having this vision’,” Jake says about the record. “There was this whole other part of myself I’d been stowing away out of fear this entire time.”
Words by Laura Freyaldenhoven