Warning: A song on this album contains explicit lyrics.

On “Riviera,” The Hellp sound exhausted.

Not in a bad way — in that distinct West Coast way, where sleep deprivation feels like enlightenment, where driving at 3 a.m. on an empty freeway becomes a religious experience.

The Hellp’s sophomore album — spanning 10 tracks, 37 minutes — arrived just a year after “LL,” but it might as well be a decade later in emotional time.

Where their previous work felt like a California dreamscape a teenager conjures while plotting escape from home (rebellious, risky, a little in love with its own heartbrokenness), this feels like watching that same kid grow up.

Los Angeles electronic duo Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have shed the scrappy synth-punk/electroclash of their earlier work — mistakenly called “indie sleaze” — and what emerges is something more authentic: a meditation on the American dream curdling into American ennui, stale and fluorescent light-lit.

“Riviera” is obsessed with Americana, but not the typical kind we associate with the label — not the South, not heartland nostalgia, but LA. The duo is in love with Los Angeles in a way that’s equal parts devotion and disgust, mapping the city’s emotional geography across pulsing synths and punchy drums. 

And this begins on the record’s very first track.

“Revenge of the Mouse Diva” opens the album with explosive energy. 

Thunderous drums crash against a staticky synth crackle, all the foreboding electricity gathering before a desert storm. The title, borrowed from an essay on American painter Karen Kilimnik, becomes sharp commentary on consumerism and Hollywood spectacle. Dillon delivers the album’s thesis with weary resignation: 

“When you live on the Walk of Fame / Don’t forget, you can walk away.” 

But the album immediately questions whether escape is even possible.

“Country Road” takes John Denver’s warm, brassy 1970s classic and subverts it completely. Instead of homesickness for West Virginia’s mountains, we get cold rhythms and brisk synths, Sunset Boulevard replacing country roads: 

“Country road, take me home / But this ain’t West Virginia / This is LA, I’m on Sunset / Driving home and I’m all alone (Ha).”

That bitter laugh punctuating the verse says everything about this album’s emotional terrain.

“Pray to Evil” begins with an E-flat chord — typically a passing tone you’d only linger on for one beat — stretched across the entire song. For twenty seconds, it’s all you hear alongside flat, standard drum beats before Dillon’s voice enters. 

The effect is immediately unsettling yet oddly comforting, abrasive but beautiful enough to pull you under. About halfway through, the refrain kicks in with infectious catchiness reminiscent of their earlier breakouts like “Tu Tu Neurotic”: 

“You took away the pain again / I saw a sign that you were in / I thought that I’d forget again / I took it all to play pretend.”

“Meridian” opens with a single piano key echoing through space, beautifully bridging acoustic and electronic sound — a geographic line marking the highest point, or the meeting of two halves. The vocals arrive incredibly refined, with all room acoustics stripped away while the piano key continues reverberating throughout. 

It’s a striking production choice that creates this sense of intimacy and distance simultaneously. From the first chorus onward, the notes turn bright and happy — a stark contrast from the clammy anxiety of the album’s opening. But the lyrics remain cynical, cutting: 

“Make peace again / Make sure you spend / Every dollar you make / Is every dollar they take.”

“New Wave America” opens with distortion, Dillon’s vocals processed until his voice box sounds like it was replaced with a synthesizer. Visual artist Sophia Álvarez drawls a manifesto to the infinite landscape with silver screen sultriness: 

“Oh, baby, you’re a one-of-one / A figurine stuck inside a dream / I’m waiting for the walls to fall / Like Jericho on the boulevard.”

The song is cold and callused, demonstrating this modern landscape of Americana the duo aims to critique.

“Corrt” delivers a fast BPM and static everywhere, the kind of song you listen to while sitting in the passenger seat before sunrise, staring into condensation-stained car windows with fascination. 

Moog-style synths twinkle like intermittent neon signs spotted from the highway: 

“It’s a hard drive into the city / In the nighttime, over the hill / I’m thinking blue eyes / They won’t deceive me here / (For the second time).”

That parenthetical stings — because it’s always a cycle, always the second time, the third time, the hundredth time searching for truth that won’t materialize.

“Modern Man” fades seamlessly from the previous track into something far more upbeat, hopeful in a beautifully self-assured way that feels almost delusional: 

“Cause I / I am the modern man / With his modern plan / And no one can stop me.” It’s the confidence you need to keep driving even when you know the destination is nowhere.

“Doppler” turns distance into something commemorative, named for the effect describing how sound waves change as they move toward or away from you. The track features acoustic guitars and languid synths, some of the Hellp’s most bittersweet lyrics about time’s passage: 

“Can’t fake a smile for my morning aftertaste / You sit so far that my heart commemorates / The feeling.”

It’s so muted and subtle you fear it could lull someone to sleep behind the wheel, but there’s a lot of beauty in that restraint.

“Here I Am” features a lush bed of horn-like synths giving way to a whining, electric squeal. 

Visual artist Maggie Cnossen (who also worked on the 2hollis music video “flash”) delivers the braindead yet deliriously addictive chorus with deadpan affect: 

“From LA to LA / La-la-la.”

The song feels like being stuck in the city, always spit out at the same freeway exits, endlessly circling the same obsessions. It’s pretty stupid and pretty perfect.

“Live Forever” is maybe my favorite track off the album. It closes the journey with Dillon sounding like he’s pleading throughout, his voice carrying a desperation that makes the title feel more like a curse than a promise. 

Ridiculous airhorn-like synths punctuate the track alongside Dillon’s vocals: 

“Here comes the hard drive into the city / Baby, it’s alright, way past a good time / Look at the starlight.” The callback to “Corrt” completes the album’s circle—we’re right back where we started, still driving, still searching, still stuck.

Here’s the paradox: “Riviera” is either the Hellp’s best album yet, or their worst.

The case for best is compelling. 

This is their most distinct, unique, calculated work — arguably their most evolved. It’s the most them they’ve ever been, finally separated from the indie sleaze label that’s followed them around. The album maintains a cohesive vision across its 37 minutes, each track building on the last to create something genuinely distinctive. 

Riviera marks a clearer definition of their sound while maintaining their appetite for referential remix, marrying newfound polish with the scuzzy, freewheeling instincts that made their early work compelling.

But it’s not nearly as catchy as “LL” or any of their previous projects. Not even close. 

Where their previous work lodged itself in your brain with infectious hooks and immediate gratification, Riviera demands patience, attention, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. It’s not nearly as approachable or listenable in the traditional sense. The features feel like evocative nods to Californian archetypes — Cnossen nails a coolly distant Valley Girl effect, Álvarez channels Monica Bellucci-like vocals — but they’re mood pieces more than earworms.

But it grows on you, starts to feel familiar, maybe even friendly, after your second or third listen. 

It’s a great listen for the foggy landscape that surrounds us in winter, so if you’ve been looking for an album to stare at your ceiling until your eyes go numb, to dissociate during a long car drive at dawn, or to survive a cold and rainy season, you found it.