Hourloupe - Last Lost Word (2026)

Prussian explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, second only to Charles Darwin in fame during his lifetime, recorded a Guarequena legend during his early nineteenth-century travels through Latin America: the Atures people, fleeing cannibalistic Carib raiders, took refuge on the inaccessible cliffs of a river cataract and died out there along with their language. All that remained of them was an old parrot in the settlement of Maypures, said by locals to speak words in the extinct tribe's language — words no one alive could understand.

That image — a vanished people and a bird carrying fragments of their dead language — became the starting point for the sixth album by the duo Hourloupe (Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov), titled Last Lost Word. Rather than retelling Humboldt's account directly, the musicians reshape it into a world of their own: Frank wrote a short story accompanying the release, set in a riverside town where a cult forms around a talking bird. The bird roams freely but speaks its untranslatable phrases only from one particular branch above the water, timing its sounds to breath, light, and current, leaving the townspeople suspended between belief and doubt.

From fragments of this story, Anar and Frank built melodies that sometimes draw close to the narrative and sometimes drift away from it, channeling its strangeness through electro-acoustic arrangements. Drawing on influences like Oneohtrix Point Never, Nicolas Jaar, Laurie Anderson, and David Bowie, they've made an album warmer and more intimate than the group's previous five releases, while still developing the recurring themes of their work — the natural world, imagination, and power's drive to control and profit from both.

Tracklist:
1. Hourloupe - Broken circle
2. Hourloupe - Lost languages
3. Hourloupe - Incidents of mirror travel
4. Hourloupe - The resistant surfaces
5. Hourloupe - The well speaks
6. Hourloupe - Whispering giant
7. Hourloupe - The country singer
8. Hourloupe - Lightning struck itself
9. Hourloupe - Legends of the Guaraquena
10. Hourloupe - Last days of the Atures
11. Hourloupe - Book of leaves
12. Hourloupe - Two winged men
13. Hourloupe - One bird may hide another bird
14. Hourloupe - Until the whole of the sky has flown