How Collaboration, Curiosity And Mortality Shaped Hiatus Kaiyote's 'Mood Valiant'

In the last decade, Hiatus Kaiyote has been synonymous with a kind of understated cool that sometimes gets mistaken for pretentiousness. The band — made up of lead singer and guitarist Nai Palm, bassist Paul Bender, keyboardist Simon Mavin and drummer Perrin Moss — is known for its intricate, genre-hopping style. Its propensity for trying on and melding different styles — R&B, hip-hop, funk, soul — has led to repeated misclassifications by music journalists and even casual fans as to the kind of music it makes. This had led to a typical back-and-forth in interviews with Kaiyote: "Are you a jazz/neo-funk/r&b group?" answered with a less concrete, but more honest: "Not any one of those things."

Still, some people seem most confident in classifying the group based on the enormously famous artists who have sampled it: , , , plus a past . This proximity to Black music, especially from a group of all-white Australians, tends to be treated as overdetermined novelty in the media,