A lot has changed since 2019 when singer, songwriter and musician Ruban Nielson began working on Unknown Mortal Orchestra‘s fifth studio album, V. Initially named Guilty Pleasures, the project transformed and evolved over time. “It’s like four years of music,” Ruban (who is Hawaiian and Maori, grew up in New Zealand and is currently based in Palm Springs) tells us. “There were quite a few different …
The demise of James Cook is legendary—especially in Polynesia and Australasia, where the English explorer was responsible for a tremendous amount of colonization. In 1779, Cook and his men attempted to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu—the chief of the island of Hawaii—under the guise of showing him their ship. Thousands of Hawaiian people gathered on the beach at Kealakekua Bay, a fight broke out, and Cook was stabbed …
On their first two albums, Portland-based Unknown Mortal Orchestra charmed fans with dirty low-fi tracks—poppy but unafraid to be thought-provoking—recorded out of a basement studio. Their third and latest effort, Multi-Love (out now via Jagjaguwar) was born in the same basement studio, but from the ashes of exhaustion, depression and too many drugs. Like a phoenix reborn in explosive sheen of disco and R&B and …
