By Athena Ryan

In the near 2 years that I’ve lived here, the course of my feelings about the Pacific Northwest has been anything but smooth. The first two months of the school year I’ve now twice spent indulging in warmth and sun, adventuring to Seattle and swimming in the Sound. I’ve found out the hard way, as all California transplants do, that these months that feel like days inevitably give way to a seemingly instant plunge into darkness, months that feel like years spent trekking to class under the gloomy skies that fill the few hours of “daylight” we’re afforded. I spend my weekdays in a haze, going through the motions of daily life with hope of a weekend that will lift my spirits. Anyone that’s read anything I’ve written about my life in the last two years can relay this feeling of stuckness that I so often describe. When left idle, I have an unshakable sense that I’m meant to be doing something with my life. I become filled with worry that I’m wasting away the best years of my life simply toiling away, the majority of my time spent shrouded in a darkness that so often feels impenetrable. It feels like there’s something in me that wants to escape, something that just can’t stand the confinement. I find myself going on countless walks in these dark months. When I had a bike they were bike rides, but after it got stolen I was left to rely on my feet alone. I couldn’t tell you how far I walk, or where I go, because it all seems to blur together like everything else. At least in my memory. Wholly unnotable, these walks feel like occurrences I’m bound to forget come the next morning. Looking back on last winter, at first glance, nothing really looks different. But digging a little deeper, I can pinpoint one clear throughline. The Hellp’s Riviera. Every time I listen to this album, I’m filled with something, something good. A sense of hope, maybe, a sense of compassion, something I can understand. That an album about LA by an electronic duo should transport me back to these long meandering walks feels incongruous at first thought, but to me, it’s an almost perfect encapsulation of this deep melancholy. 

The Hellp’s 2025 Riviera is an album of maturation and coming-of-age, a theme that expresses itself through the dreamy, nostalgic images painted by the lyrics and in the more polished, developed sound that the record takes on. Their second official album, Riviera indulges in the excesses of fame, the otherworldly draw of LA, and the inescapable humanity that still resides within them, no matter their success. The duo, made up of Noah Dillon on vocals and Chandler Lucy on “drums,” is from LA, but Dillon is originally from Durango, CO and Lucy from Glen Ellen, CA (only twenty minutes from my own stomping grounds…). They’re new to LA—both physically and to the world of celebrity it represents. Taking hold in the early 2020s, the Hellp’s compilation album Vol 1. and debut album LL have since their release been closely associated with the indie sleaze revival. The duo rejects that association, though it evidently helped propel their rise to prominence. Riviera, their second album for Atlantic Records under the Anemoia imprint, solidifies their rejection as their sound and themes move away from classic, 2000s-esque club bangers and shift to greater complexity and introspection. The record repeatedly conjures up images of late-night drives (the LA equivalent to Tacoma’s long walks), the harsh reality of solitude and loneliness seeping through the haze of fame and celebrity life. Scenes of drug- and adrenaline-fueled partying are interposed with flashes of deeper emotions, painting a picture of a life of excess that isn’t enough to fully escape the ups and downs intrinsic to the human experience. 

The 6th track, one of my favorites, Cortt, illustrates it perfectly. The chorus melodically paints a picture: “It’s a hard drive into the city/In the nighttime over the hill/I’m thinking blue eyes/They won’t deceive me here/(for a second time).” Intercutting images of nights out, striking realizations of solitude and past pains manifesting themselves moment to moment, creating a feeling of being lost in the world you thought you knew. The second verse hammers it in, featuring Sophia Álvarez’s refrain of “you are all alone.” Track 4, Meridian, illuminates the machine-like life of productivity expected of us all in our society, but more specifically the mechanization of artists, forced to pump out products to make a living, a perversion of the very nature of art that’s required constantly to achieve “success.” The verse analogs the experience of successful artists to the work of a computer, presenting the dehumanization forced by the industry that leads to the detachment from life that the album looks at again and again. A life of fame drains them, leaving them feeling like a husk of their former selves. Doppler furthers the disconnection from a sense of self, the chorus’s “you feel like a copy of someone else/but even better,” echoing the fleeting, shallow nature of connections in that environment. In the world The Hellp illustrates, the past loses tangibility, identity loses realness. Noah Dillon tells 032c that Doppler’s “yesterday was just a feeling” is meant to convey his disillusionment—his feeling of disconnect from his past work meaning everything and nothing, to him, a freeing feeling. It inspires him to keep moving forward, to keep making new art. This begins to get at a more hopeful message of the record: that even in times of darkness, you gotta keep moving, keep writing, keep creating, cuz that’s what keeps us alive. 

With Riviera, The Hellp is taking a deep feeling of hopelessness, feeling lost, feeling removed from yourself by the machinations of a productivity-focused world, and turning it into something beautiful and hopeful, something essentially human. When I listen to this album, I don’t feel despair. I feel someone representing the realities of the external world we live in and deciding to let the internal, the emotional—the stuff that really matters—break through. For me, this is the point of art. At least it is in my life. When I feel stuck in academia, in professionalism, in the mundane and menial, I write, I play music, I make art. The Hellp found success in a world of surface-level hits and indie sleaze style (which is no doubt still awesome) and were thrust into the world of fame and the realities that came with it. Riviera is their refusal to submit to it, taking the more difficult, introspective, ever-changing path of humanness and feeling. The album shows that no matter how deep in the weeds of production you are, you can’t escape the realities of human existence, whether they feel amazing, terrible, or anything in between, and that the best thing you can do is embrace it. Along with their expansion in musical style, the world and themes of Riviera represent a major leap forward and shift in direction for The Hellp. This record soundtracked the first couple months of 2026 for me and returns to me again and again. Riviera helps me find beauty in the mundane—it tells me to do something with the things I feel. We endlessly glamorize the weekends spent doing anything we can to forget the dejection of the weekdays, but maybe those dreary late-night walks are just as important.