URUBURU (2025 HLLLYH album) – Queen City Sounds and Art

In the video for HLLLYH’s “Flex It, Tagger” we are taken back in time to an alternate reality where a punk tagger is adding some color to a rundown, possibly abandoned house. All the while headlong drums and a minimal, spiky guitar melody sketches the soundtrack to come. What the tagger doesn’t know is that someone inside seems to be hacking reality itself. And streaks of color run across the screen over normal existence as various taggers are profiled and hunted down by drones from a retro-futurist version of an authoritarian, technocratic regime as part of “Project Carnivore.” The song is like a more eccentric pop punk but with the same exuberance and ear for melody and exciting rhythms that make that music work. But not to worry, as in real life, things don’t go as planned and the infrastructure that makes the drone strike and persecution malfunctions and waxes itself. The end. It’s an absurd premise straight out of a more ambitious and surreal take end of the movie Hackers (1995) but it has the kind of energy we need now when technology seems to be channeled into the most dystopian, fascist plots to destroy society and the planet and it needs to be subverted by ideas and actions the techbros can’t envision with no small amount of mockery thrown in. Watch the video for “Flex It, Tagger” on YouTube and follow HLLLYH (formerly The Mae Shi) at the links below. The band’s debut album URUBURU released June 27, 2025 via Team Shi.

HLLLYH on Instagram

The Mae Shi on Bandcamp

In the heyday of America’s DIY music world of the 2000s and early 2010s The Mae Shi were stars in their own right as staples of the eclectic and joyous milieu around the venue The Smell before splitting up the first time in 2009. In 2022 Tim Byron felt like he had another story to tell that led him to bringing the band back together for another, initially final, album. But those plans evolved and the new album had to be made as a re-branding of The Mae Shi as HLLLYH, the title to the group’s 2007 former swansong, a move to reflect a link to the past and the creation of something new. Informed by Twentieth century mystics like Gurdjieff, Crowley, McPherson and McKenna the new album titled URUBURU relates a tale of a hero’s journey to the spirit world and back but that hero could really be anyone willing to undertake the trials and tribulations involved. The new album is brimming with the raw exuberance, anthemic hooks and analog electronic weirdness that made The Mae Shi so appealing.

Lead single “Dead Clade” with its music 2010’s-era video game graphics video seems to be tapping into a moment of modern doomerism but delivered with a playful abandon. Images of dinosaurs and humans frolicking about getting downed by natural phenomena and other refinements run through the video. And the lyric about “How we’re not special, we’re just what’s left, we’re not chosen, we’re a dead clade” is a bit arcane except for the sentiment about how humanity thinks its the end of the evolution of life on the planet while we’re doing our level best to ensure our extinction and replacement by a successor dominant species through the self-destructive folly of our current civilizational program. HLLLYH, though, with its upbeat melodies and soaring vocals remind us that it’s not all over for the planet when climate change wipes out the human race as it is and the precious artifacts of all we value and hold dear are swept away, but it is probably over for life as we know it. And there’s something comforting in that thought in the grand scheme of things. Of course it’s tongue in cheek but rarely has the end of the world seemed so cheerful and something to celebrate. Watch the video for “Dead Clade” (a “clade” is a “group of organisms believed to have evolved from a common ancestor) on YouTube and follow HLLLYH at the links provided.