Hiatus - Is (2024)

Is will be the fifth album from Hiatus, who lives and works in South London. It’s his most joyful record to date, something he attributes in part to a recent flurry of live performances, his first in ten years, which reminded him of the power of music to connect us to something timeless. He says of the album: “In some ways it’s a natural follow-up to the previous record, Distancer, in that it features collaborations with the Iranian singer Malahat Haddad, while Faraz’s kamancheh weaves throughout on every track. But while Distancer was eerie and occasionally mournful – written during the pandemic, and reflecting the grief and isolation of that period – Is is characterised by a sense of euphoria, a celebration of the cosmic joy that can be found only in the present moment, when rumination on the past and anxieties over the future fall away.”