Maribou State: a good album hidden under 22 extras

Hallucinating Love has a good album in it. The trouble is getting past the other 22 tracks to find it.

The deluxe edition, released August 21, 2026 on Ninja Tune, presents 32 tracks under the album’s title. The first ten are the album proper: Blackoak opens, Passing Clouds cuts through at 2:23, Rolling Stone closes after a sequence built around All I Need, Dance on the World, Bloom, Peace Talk and Eko’s. The remaining 22 are eight demos and fourteen remixes, including Maribou State remixing their own opener. That is a lot of product.

The core tracklist has a clear internal logic. Only Blackoak passes four and a half minutes. Everything else sits between 3:30 and 4:29, except Passing Clouds, a 2:23 cut that reads as a breather. That restraint suggests a group treating Hallucinating Love as a single, even flow, not a pile of ideas. Titles like Dance on the World and Peace Talk point to a record that knows how to move from the dance floor to a comedown without losing its pulse. You can track that arc without hearing a note: opener, momentum, short interlude, longer closing statement. It is a structure that deserves to be judged as an album.

The deluxe framing almost hides it. Eight demos and fourteen remixes bury the sequence under alternate versions, rough sketches and outside remixers. Some demo titles (Acid Dad, Speed 2) read as the duo working through ideas rather than finishing them. A remix section that begins with the artist remixing themselves is a small admission that the original tracks were not enough on their own. The result is an hour-plus wall, not a record. Even if every individual cut is fine, the package defeats the listening experience; it asks you to treat the document as more important than the music.

Strip Hallucinating Love down to its ten core tracks and you have a sharp, compact electronic album with an earned closer. The deluxe edition is an archive. The record is in there. You just have to dig.

The tracklist

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