HHY & The Macumbas - Bom sangue mau (2024)

‘Bom Sangue Mau’, the forthcoming album from Portuguese ensemble HHY & The Macumbas, is the first release on the newly established Horror Vector label exploring percussion work developed in parallel with projects like HHY & The Macumbas and HHY & The Kampala Unit to choir pieces in resonant spaces, electric Dubs and soundtracks for neo-animist lithium themed dance pieces. A stream of consciousness emerging from the studio Skull Cave Studio in the city of Porto, and cross collaborating with musicians, dancers and artists from around the spectrum.

Having worked together for fifteen years, HHY & The Macumbas are chasing their own void. Previously receiving support from tastemakers including The Quietus, NTS, The Arts Desk, Chicago Reader, and Mary Anne Hobbs (BBC Radio 6 Music) among others, the band’s fourth album 'Bom Sangue Mau' (good bad blood, in English), is set to be released on the 31st May.

To record the album, the band set up their gear in an empty theatre, using a full sound-system, lighting rig and smoke machines, to bottle the raw, unpredictable energy of their kinetic live performances. And with polymath Jonathan Uliel Saldanha at the mixing desk, and Brendan Hemsworth, Filipe Silva, Frankão, João Pais Filipe on percussion, André Rocha on horns and Francisco Antão providing additional electronics, the band set about puncturing a wormhole in the cosmos. Venturing into unique soundtracks and boundary-pushing dub experiments, they immersed the stage in a deep red glow, using crumpled rhythms, eerie synthesisers, wild-eyed horn sounds and serious bass pressure to build a place of dread and ascension.

Opening track 'Via Negativa' sounds like a lost zombie movie theme, with jagged, electrifying lead synths puppeteering the ritualistic rhythm section. Dramatic and bursting with tension, it's music that absorbs mayhem, but diverts it into a new dub-wise realm of stygian atmospherics. 'Serpente Explícita' overlaps pattering rhythmics against ambient jungle pads, while 'Febre Febre' is a lysergic carnival at the end of the world, all dance-floor momentum and buzzing, animalistic horns. On the terrifying 'Fundição Termal Caçada', HHY & The Macumbas hand-craft a grisly epic from swaying polyrhythms and ecstatic waves of electronics, while the aptly-titled 'Porno Perpetuum' dwells through the rapid-fire of bone-rattling drums and its dusty titillating cinematic excesses.

Sculpting a sonic landscape that's drenched in blood and draped with confetti, 'Bom Sangue Mau' is an album of tension; a game tightly controlled by a set of players who have developed their own meta-language, collaborating intuitively rather than following rigid formats. Prismatic, psychedelic, and unpredictable, it's another bold step forward into the present in all its suffocating radiance.

HHY & The Macumbas have shared their onstage zombie energy with audiences across Europe, and have performed at festivals including Sónar, Primavera Sound and Le Guess Who?