WHO'S THAT? Hyd

Hyd’s new album Hold Onto Me Infinity explores what might exist beyond the physical world — and, according to them, it’s endless. Largely recorded in Iceland, the project was inspired by Hyd’s research into volcanoes: powerful, energetic forces that feel both grounded and strangely weightless. Across the album, they use those ideas to examine life, death and transformation. Songs like “Angel” and “Physical Stuff” treat death as nonlinear, while “Makeover” and “Make Me Believe” arrive at hopeful conclusions: that love remains possible, and that we always have the capacity to reinvent ourselves.

We sat down for coffee on the morning of their opening at Company Gallery for Never Is Over — the title of both the exhibition and a song from the album. Hyd spoke about their morning rituals, finding meaning in unexpected moments (like hearing Prince on the radio and interpreting it as a message from the universe) and using their art to build the kind of world they want to live in.

I want to talk about Iceland, that’s such an interesting part of this album.

Have you been?

No, I want to know more. Is that a place you’ve frequented a lot? How’d you end up there?

I went there when I was 17 for the first time. I went by myself. There was a travel agency down the street from my house in Texas, and I walked there and I bought a ticket for a year and a half. I think it was a $200 round trip, and that was how I first entered into Iceland, but I always wanted to go there. I love volcanoes and anything that has big energy. Their geothermal energy is unmatched, so I got really excited about touring energy facilities as a teenager. I love energy.

With this album, did you want to immerse yourself in that world to make the music? What’s the relationship between the two?

I started working on this album in Los Angeles, and when I was describing the sound, there were all of these volcanic references. I wanted it to be both really robust, but also weightless. There’s something about lava that can take up a lot of space and completely transform environments, but also it’s full of holes and very light, so that was a good fit for me.

Were you thinking about how these physical qualities could translate musically?

Absolutely. I love researching elements. Also, a lot of times when I need support around things that are earthside, I’ll look to the elemental world for advice or different forms of care.

Did you go to Iceland and record these songs?

I did, yeah.

Top down, all of them?

Not all of them. They were also recorded in New York, but the bulk of them came from Iceland.

How did being in Iceland change the process, compared to New York or LA?

My process of making work there involves spending a lot of time in hot springs in the morning, so when I wake up that’s my first order of business. It’s kind of acclimating my body to a specific frequency in order to be ready to receive the work or be ready to work in a specific way, and I think the water really helps me and informed a lot of the sounds. I don’t think it would be the same album if it was recorded somewhere else.

Do you feel different when you’re making music and haven’t done that process? Did you decide, This needs to happen in order for me to unlock the level of creativity I’m seeking?

I do a lot of material integrations. So when I wake up in the morning, if I feel weird, I might drink, for example, this water that I’m drinking right now that I decided to get. This water has a really high saline content and so I was thinking, Maybe it’d be nice if I got that, so I can be more fortified in this conversation. My experience with elements is that if you choose them accordingly, you support different states of being.

I’m so inspired by that. [Laughs] I wake up every day and do the exact opposite, but I guess that’s just a New York sensibility to not connect with yourself at all and enter the world hoping for the best.

[Laughs] I like that way, too.

Did you set out to make a specific album, or did you start at a certain place and let the music unfold naturally?

It informed me more than I informed it. It was more like a listening practice than a talking practice. I didn’t start with an idea and try to execute that idea. It was more listening for what came through, but what came through was so completely unexpected. It was not in my mind’s eye what I was making until it was already made. I feel like it almost made itself. I didn’t have perspective on it until it was all done, really. This happens with work with me sometimes, especially with lyrics, where lyrics will come and I’ll think, I have no idea where that came from or where that’s going, and then a year later it will be crystal clear what it’s talking about. But I think there’s a larger dialog happening that I’m engaged in that I’m not always cognitively aware of. It’s not from my brain, it’s from a different part of me.

There are so many ways to work, but that feels better than forcing something into existence.

And there is a moment where you have to start wrangling. It’s almost like wild horses in the field and you’re like, We’re going into this pen over here. It’s kind of like, What do I have to do to get it over here? So there is this part of the process where you’re really directing, and it’s like a rodeo or there’s Broncos involved and you’re riding. But that’s not the beginning for me. The beginning is really soft and it’s allowing things to come through that have their own path, that I’m not conscious of where that path is going. I’m just in a trust, surrender, almost free fall faith place.

Have you always worked that way?

I have worked that way in a scriptural capacity, or in making artwork, 100%. And then with songwriting, I think at the beginning it was really about temperature. How can I change the temperature of a song? But I realized a lot of that also has to do with a state of being. If I’m in a more vaporist state, the lyrics might be harder to catch versus if I’m in a more grounded state, so a lot of that also has to do with augmenting where I’m at for what I can receive.

When you look at the album now, what do you realize happened? In terms of storytelling and ideas, and what you collected?

Well, I love this question, because it’s a really big question. It’s a macro question. Like, Can you look at the whole scope? Now that you’ve stepped away from it, can you see it? What do you see? That’s really what you’re asking. The thing that I see is me trying to find my way back to my body. My partner passed away a few years ago, and that was a real moment of leaving my body completely and not really having a way back. Singing and trying to think about bodies as host forms, and actually a gorgeous space, and something really fun and effervescent and hot and weird. That was a catalyst as I was working. As I was singing and writing and thinking about production, that was an invitation for me to come back in. Because if you’re making music from a disembodied place, for me, you can really hear it in the sound. So it was really compelling to be embodied while making this work. When I hear it, I think about different places that I was in when I was making it.

Even the opening track “Angel” was full body. When I was in the studio working with Hudson Mohawke, I was dancing the whole day, and it was one of the worst days I’ve ever had, actually. I woke up, my studio had exploded with water. It was filling with water, all of my neighbors were freaking out, and we were all with pails trying to move this water out of the studio. I had the session and I thought I had to cancel it, of course, but I wound up going. Something happened in the music, and I think this is where, for me as a medium, music becomes really interesting, because it can completely change your emotional composition. I didn’t tell Ross [Hudson Mohawke] what had happened. The studio also becomes a container where a new world can come, and a lot of the work I’m interested in making is like, How can we hold heaven on earth here? How can we make a new world here? And in working in sonic palettes and vibrations and in frequencies and voice, there is this potential for that to happen. It doesn’t always happen and a lot of it is actually the failure of when it doesn’t happen. But on that day, something else came through and that is why I make work. I get so excited about those moments that cross through, or where you have something that feels almost like interdimensional communication, or so grounded it’s like you’re in another place.

I feel like the studio — the way you describe it — can become one of two things: either a painful place where you’re trying to force something to happen, or this mysterious process of making something with other people where you’re just like, How is this happening? Where is this even coming from?

Well, there’s a crossover too with galleries or making work inside of galleries or museums, where it’s just a container. So it’s like, What are you gonna fill the container with? Songwriting is very much like that as well. What’s going in the container? How is it gonna feel after, and can it move you? Can it literally move you physically? But can something move through? I really use music in that way, as well. If I’m having a bad day or I feel weird, I will play things that down regulate me, or make me dance, or feel explosive and expressive and are an outlet.

My read on your perspective around life and death is that it ultimately arrives at something optimistic. How do you feel this project speaks to those ideas?

There are no beginnings, there are no ends. I really think of endings as new openings. If I actually thought of them as conclusive, like it’s over, I would be a different person and approach my life really differently. But the structure of an album is also really interesting, because there is a beginning and an end, like there’s a first and final track. But a lot of my understanding of this life is that we get to start over at the end. We’re not limited to this one form or this one story or this one way of being. Actually, we get another try and that’s the question. I don’t know the answer because I have not entered that space. It’s definitely been a huge part of my research here on earth, learning about what happens on the other side.

That connects to the idea of “Infinity” in your album title, Hold Onto Me Infinity. Or the song, “Never Is Over” as an extension of that. How did you land on that idea?

Never Is Over is the title of my exhibition [at Company Gallery], but it originated as a song, which is also on the album. My brother passed away, he was in an accident. He was hit by a drunk driver at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where I’m from. He was in a coma for a long time and then became an organ donor. There are seven people who have parts of him in them, which was something that I could never have imagined. It’s beyond the scope of my understanding of what is possible in this world. His material body could actually go on beyond him, and that I could hug someone and they have part of him inside of them, literally. So this idea, Never Is Over, it’s true. It has been true in my life and my experience, where we keep going anyway and so does he in this other way that no one could have ever imagined. I was in Berlin after he passed, and this song came through in one continuous form. I was in the bathroom at a restaurant, and I just heard this melody and I recorded it all at once. It was just the verse, the chorus, the verse, the chorus, and it all came through. So it’s one of my favorite songs on the album, but it’s also one that really supported me in this difficult time. Just being able to sing it or having this reminder that, in the way that it’s over, it never is really over. That’s the verse of the song.

It’s such a beautiful idea.

It’s been so specific to my experience, but in breakups or in any endings, I don’t believe in time being linear, like there’s beginning, middle, end. But there are these moments where time collapses, or you get visits from a past version of yourself into the future version. In this moment there I really felt like another version of me was with me, helping me and giving me these lyrics. Now I’m about to go on tour and sing every day, so it’s also interesting how these repetitions, like with making music and making this work, I get to be in that world that I made for myself or a different version made for me. I really felt this way about the last album, because it was made before my partner died, and there were so many strange references and things that I could never have imagined being part of it. Then later, it was like an entirely new context. I heard it completely differently after she passed, so music has this way of working, of containing people beyond their form. I think that the show, Never Is Over, really looks at that.

There’s nothing more powerful than music — you perform for a crowd, and people take those feelings and ideas with them into the world. It’s almost like being an organ donor, but for ideas. Parts of you live on in other people. The reach of that is kind of insane — that something you created gets absorbed, carried forward and becomes part of someone else’s life.

Music is amazing in that way. There’s all these ripples and reverberations and ricochets. You can never expect how the work that you’re making can affect someone else, not even within a year, but like within 10 years or within 50 years. It’s very moving to me.

I want to talk about what the music actually sounds like, because I’m curious what references you’re pulling from and what you’ve been listening to. What I hear in some of these songs is this big, emotional ’80s pop sensibility, which feels really interesting — and kind of surprising — in the context of your world. Is that something you connect to?

Well, this morning I was listening to Third Eye Blind. [Laughs] This is such a great question, and honestly, I wish I had more awareness of this time period, because there had to be influences, but really it’s more that I love big, dramatic sounds. Like, I love it when you can feel the bass in your body. A lot of the sounds were made with the thought of listening to them live and in spaces with huge sound, and what it would feel like for your body to be vibrating to the specific pattern. So that was more influential to me than other musicians.

Were you thinking about the ’80s at all?

I love the ’80s, but not so much in a linear one-to-one way.

You weren’t like, I’m pulling from this and pulling from that.

Like, I wasn’t listening to Madonna a lot, or something like that.

That’d be the linear approach.

You know who I think is worth mentioning? Prince. Prince became a subcultural code for me, where if I heard Prince in a car, it felt like a message. So I can see there being references to that, because that was really the language that I was in. I was listening in car rides and cabs for messages to come through songs. And, working on this album, a lot of times messages would come through Prince songs. There’s a reference to that in the album as well.

Which song?

It’s on the song “Physical Stuff,” it talks about Prince.

I’m from Minneapolis, so–

Okay, amen.

I love Prince. I hear that on “Makeover” and “Make Me Believe.” Those two specifically have this big Prince-like pop production. But it makes sense that you’re thinking about the music in more of a physical way.

Those songs were made with SOPHIE and she loves Prince. She really loves Prince.

You mentioned you think about how songs feel in your body. What is the checkpoint in the studio when you’re like, I feel or I don’t feel?

A lot of times it won’t happen on the first day, but it’ll happen on the second listen. If I wake up the next morning singing the melody, for me that’s a signifier, but sometimes songs aren’t ready for five years, six years, seven years, and it’s almost like you just have to believe in the process instead of trying to shape it into something or twist it in the moment. So I really try to let the songs lead, but for me it comes through a feeling.

And then at certain points you’re like, Okay, I need to revisit this idea or song?

Yes, or it just happens anyway. With “Makeover,” it happened because I was driving and I was looking for directions or something, and the Notes app just opened on my phone to the session from nine years prior that had all the lyrics for “Makeover,” and that was when I thought, Oh, wow, there’s actually this other verse that I hadn’t thought about. So there’s synchronicities or things outside my field of understanding, and that really becomes the thing that informs the next decision.

I guess you’d have to stay pretty open to receiving those messages, because I think most people either don’t notice them or don’t really care. You have to be in tune with yourself enough to recognize when something might actually mean something. Do you feel like that’s true for you?

Yes, and it is true of how I choose to be in my life. It is a choice that I have agency over, if I’m listening or not. And it wasn’t always true that I was listening. I used to be very direct and extremely bossy, controlling, tight, almost just knowing what I wanted and doing it. Also, when you’re in grief, listening for what else is happening that you can’t see, for me, became a necessary path for living, for how to stay interested and curious about earth stuff. Being in this world was kind of like, Are there any moments where this other world is coming through? How do I create a world here that I want to live in? For me, that comes through listening.

That’s a good question to ask yourself. [Laughs] How do I create a world here that I want to live in?

It really is.

So you feel like grief was really the turning point in shifting your perspective?

Absolutely, yeah.

What is “Freak” about?

When I was in high school, I had a crush on this person who went to a private school and I went to a public school. A lot of my research was trying to figure out if she was like me or not, and if she would like me or not. There were all of these moments that happened, like her bringing this boy into her car and making eye contact with me when she made out with him, and me realizing that I was the boy in the car and that he was a proxy for me, and that was how we could be together and be close to each other. So there’s this queer lineage legacy that has happened a million times over, and also happened to me, where I realized I could be beyond my form. And the form that I was in, we couldn’t be together, but in this other form I could be with her. So that’s where “Freak” began, and where “Freak” ended is, there’s almost an interdimensional being, which is also a version of me that’s witnessing and tracking and being with this younger version of me, and also trying to support and figure out if she’s a freak like me.

Even though those early experiences of understanding queerness were painful, confusing and exhausting — and still can be — there was also something exciting about them when you were younger. Like in high school, it felt like trying to solve a mystery: What am I feeling? What are you feeling? Looking back, that was an interesting period. And clearly it stayed with you if you still feel drawn to revisit it.

Absolutely. Also, it’s a moment where you’re trying to find some kind of thread with someone, and also just aware that you’re different from other people. They may not be like you.

It’s both those things at once, which is so complicated.

Interview & Photos: Justin Moran

Art Direction & Design: Zach Pacheco