Hiatus Kaiyote, Love Heart Cheat Code You may think you’ve never heard of Hiatus Kaiyote, but you probably have. Kendrick Lamar, Drake , and Beyonce and Jay-Z have all sampled songs from the Melbourne quartet. They’ve been up for Grammy Awards three times, becoming the first Australian group to be nominated in the R&B category.
And they’ve been lauded by the likes of Erykah Badu, Questlove and the late Prince. Hiatus Kaiyote consists of singer Nai Palm, bassist Paul Bender, keyboardist Simon Mavin, and drummer Perrin Moss. Credit: Rocket Weijers So, apart from those in the know, how can they still be something of a cult band in their own country? Part of it probably has something to do with their genre.
Or, rather, the inability to comfortably place them in any single genre. They get tagged as R&B, or progressive R&B, or neo-soul, or future soul, or funk, or jazz-funk. Suffice to say, they’re not easily categorised.
When you learn that they played their very first gig in 2011 at a masquerade ball that also featured sword swallowers, fire twirlers and gypsy death core bands, it kind of makes perfect sense. They work with odd time signatures, glitchy rhythms, loopy atmospherics and liquid instrumentation. So, no, you can’t put Hiatus Kaiyote in a box, least of all their lead singer, Naomi Saalfield, who goes by the appropriately explosive stage name Nai Palm.
Her striking appearance of tribal-meets-anime facial piercings and Egyptian-meets-Kabuki style make-up, is ech.