Maribou State: the slow return, and what it cost

Hallucinating Love is a record about getting back upright. Maribou State's third album lands on Ninja Tune, the first in seven years, low-lit and in no hurry. Chris Davids and Liam Ivory sound like two producers who stopped expecting the next tour to fix them and made an album instead.

Davids and Ivory met at school in Berkhamsted, put out a first EP, Habitat, in 2011, and spent years on EPs and remixes for the likes of Lana Del Rey and Fatboy Slim before Portraits arrived in 2015 on Ninja Tune's Counter Records. Portraits and Kingdoms in Colour took them to Sydney Opera House, Glastonbury and sold-out rooms across Europe and North America, plus a single with Khruangbin, 'Feel Good'. Then the touring stopped and lockdown started. Liam has been blunt about the aftermath: 'There was a massive fallout from us touring the world and then as soon as we finished, being locked down.'

The record took years and at least one false start. The duo scrapped a first draft and booked writing trips to force a new flow, landing some of the album on a trip in spring 2022. Then Davids went in for surgery in November 2023 with the album close to finished, and the complications were serious enough that the release was pushed back so he could recover. 'It was heartbreaking to see him try and push on in the studio, sometimes he would keel over from the pain and then try to push on with work again,' Liam has said. Davids and Ivory play every instrument and produced and mixed it themselves, with Matt Colton mastering, Matthew Kelly on strings, and Rory Dewar on artwork.

The sound stays where they built their name: downtempo and soulful, generous with space, unafraid of strings. The mood is hope, and it holds for most of the running time. Voices carry most of it. Holly Walker, in this band's orbit since the early EPs, takes Otherside and comes back for Peace Talk. All I Need belongs to Andreya Triana. Dance on the World brings in North Downs, their longest-standing collaborator. Bloom hands the microphone to Gaidaa. Seven more singers sit in the additional-vocal credits, among them Claudia Jessie and Hannah Ivory, so the record plays less like a duo album with guests than a room full of people.

Blackoak opens it, the closer shuts the door ten tracks later, and the sequencing is the most deliberate thing here. II Remember is the only track in the first half with no guest attached, which after two vocal turns makes it feel like the duo staking a claim on their own record. On the second side, Eko's lands between the shortest thing here, Passing Clouds, and the finale, and it is the stretch where the arrangements finally get to breathe.

This is for people who play Portraits on a Sunday, and for anyone who came in through the Khruangbin single and wants to know what these two do without a hook to hang on. It sits next to Bonobo at his most horizontal and the calm end of the Ninja Tune catalogue. This is music for a long drive home. If you need the record to move, it will not.

Four featured guests and seven more voices, and almost nobody gets a full track to become a character. The warmth spreads so evenly that it flattens, and Passing Clouds is over before it registers. The run around it is where attention drifts.

Still, this is a record made under conditions that would have excused a much worse one, and the care shows in how little it demands. A 3.5: good, earned, and short of the Maribou State that used to take the roof off a room. Play it start to finish, in daylight.

The tracklist

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