Hiatus Kaiyote / Canopic Jar (Neon Green Vinyl)

Today, the twice Grammy-nominated band Hiatus Kaiyote shares a new song, “Canopic Jar’, to mark a very Hiatus Halloween. ‘Canopic Jar’ is their first new music since the acclaimed release of the album “Mood Valiant” in June.

Singer Nai Palm is a long-time lover of Halloween inspired music, as she explains in the song’s meaning...

“A canopic jar is an ancient artifact from Egypt. When they preserved the body through mummification for the afterlife, the organs were contained in a canopic jar.  I used this image of preserving something in this lifetime to be accessed in another as a metaphor for an unobtainable relationship, to re-appear throughout the ages because circumstances won’t allow it this time around.

I am obsessed with Halloween playlists, and keeping in the vein of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller", Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “Feast of the Mau Mau “, and our own "Swamp Thing”, we wanted to explore the spooky thematics in how we produced the song. There are real wolves that I recorded after visiting a wolf sanctuary in Upstate New York. Bender added harrowing cello recorded in an empty water tank, Simon went full Phantom of the Opera organ-style, and Perrin's drum tones sound like a werewolf-gorilla hybrid smashing through a cityscape.  We basically like to create tiny sonic movies with each song we make.

Ironically, the person the song was written about is now my partner, and he added the Vincent Price villain laugh at the end of the song under the pseudonym Eddy Knife Hands, which kinda wraps the witchy sonic spell up nicely, haha.”