Video: Hyooman’s “Half Brain”
A pandemic isn’t necessarily the best time to start a band. That hasn’t stopped several, including one of the latest introductions to the local scene, Minneapolis five piece Hyooman. Hyooman started when Leng Mua (songwriter, vox, guitar) decided to make a go of it and recruited four friends to start the endeavor in Late 2020. Now, a scant few months later the band sounds remarkably self-realized.
Hyooman describes their sound as falling “somewhere in between 90s/early 2000s alt-rock and the lo-fi bedroom pop of Alex G,” and they record live so as to avoid the sterility of multitrack studio recording (despite the impracticality of putting 5 people in a room together during COVID). Though their decision to record live was to “embrace looseness and mistakes” that definitely doesn’t come off as sloppy in single “Half Brain.” It’s a smartly written pop song that fully embraces the group’s chosen influences.
Both the sound as well as the group’s self-consciously sarcastic approach to the lyrics fully bring me back to the alt-pop of my youth, though they have successfully avoided some of the more excessively sugar-coated extremes of that era. “Half Brain” sounds warm and organic, and just modern enough to not be considered a relic.
You can stream the single/video above – the rest of the band’s first EP is still TBD but you can follow/keep track of updates here.
