It was 10 years ago, in a house on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, that Ives Sepulveda Minho and Manuel Parra started playing music together, and The Holydrug Couple was effectively born. A decade later, they’ve made Hyper Super Mega, an album that represents the culmination of everything they’ve learned in their years as a band.
If Hyper Super Mega feels like a classic pop record, that’s because Sepulveda and Parra spent much of the recording process thinking about the classic pop records of the ’60s and ’70s. Masterpieces by bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Fleetwood Mac were all reference points, not always explicitly in sound, but certainly in spirit. The duo approached the mythos of the “classic album” from their own inimitable psych-pop perspective, hoping to make a record that felt authentically like The Holydrug Couple that could fit into the same canon. By that criterion, Hyper Super Mega is a massive success. All the elements that made the band’s previous albums Noctuary and Moonlust great are distilled to their purest essence and rendered in obsessive detail.
Hyper Super Mega by The Holydrug Couple