welcome to my hippo headspace

A little over two months ago, I finished the final version of my first album and released it into the wild.

Crazy right?

The inception of hippolofi started as a joke when my friend Andrew sent me a video of his roommate’s alarm going off in the morning, saying “sample this”. I was inspired and that audio ended up being the beeping alarm in the intro for waking up. This was around November 2022 when I had taken the last half of summer + the first half of fall to dive deeper into trying to produce. All my songs at that time had been Soundcloud one-offs, but I felt like I had learned enough to attempt a larger scale project.

I was visiting home for Thanksgiving, but ended up living on my sister's couch for a week because my Mom unluckily caught covid. On a walk, I took this photo that ended up becoming the first concept art for the idea. I saw cycles and loops in a simple park bench, which to me invoked lofi themes.

I ended up choosing to go with it because it felt like the most approachable genre for my initial album. I didn’t have to worry about recording vocals or masterfully mixing each song. Things could be rough around the edges because they were supposed to be. That gave me more headspace to think about concept, structure, and other aspects important to me for a cohesive body of work. I hadn’t played with these aspects before, but to keep myself on track I set a (very ambitious) deadline of three months to get it done.


… Yeah, it didn’t pan out how I had imagined. February rolled up and I only had about half the songs done with tacky first drafts. Making enough unique tracks for an album release was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, especially with no strategy. I figured it would be smart to start planning everything out, from song themes to titles to possible transitions. This helped immensely, and by April, I was able to pump out twelve solid demos. I was content with the foundation that I had built; what was left was a matter of reviewing and editing over and over again.


I hated it. I spent the next several months stuck in a loop. Initially with the draft downloaded on my phone, I listened to my album everywhere I went, taking notes about each song on what sounded wrong. Then I’d get back home and read over the notes, making changes to fix those problems. I would repeat this enough to get so sick of the music that I was convinced no amount of edits could ever make it release ready. It was demoralizing, and it made me walk away from the process for weeks at a time. Ironically, what remotivated me was simply returning to the album and realizing that my songs did sound good and were getting better. The real problem was that I was chasing an unachievable perfection. I would eventually have to call it complete or the project would stay in this limbo forever. It was late July when the album reached its current iteration. Online release and distribution wasn’t too hard to figure out, and just like that, a few weeks later my first album was officially out.


Excitement. Joy. Pride. Anticipation. Relief?
There I was in my room, simply sitting at my desk and looking at hippolofi on Spotify. It was all somehow still overwhelming. I didn’t know what to do next. Did I count as a legit artist now? Was this something I should announce through social media? Or maybe it’s better to be lowkey about it and just mention it casually when people ask how I’ve been? I was feeling insecure. I had finally felt like the album was good enough. I wasn’t ready to hear if others had the same opinion. The sudden need to taper my own expectations hit me like a brick, so I decided to tell a few close friends and figure out the rest later.

In hindsight, I ended up tapering too much, and I downplayed my own achievement. I am really proud of what I was able to create, and I am super happy with the final product. I’ve realized that I don’t need the validation to know that my album is good. Every time I listen to it, I’m jamming and grooving along (and I have great taste in music so that means it must be good right?). Ultimately I made this album for myself, and what it means to me is more important than anything else. In this past year I’ve spent countless hours alone working on these songs and I feel like they’ve become a time capsule for this period of my life. I think that’s why I wanted to write this open letter to belatedly commemorate the release.


It’s been a year now since I graduated college. A year of young adulthood unadulterated. A year of working and calendar cramping. A year of highs and lows, but mostly mids. It was relatively uneventful and slow, but blink and you’d miss it. I’ve gone through periods of mixed motivation and moods. The day to day was what stood out to me — the importance of appreciating the details in routine. I wanted to capture that simplistic beauty of life. To me, hippolofi represents the smaller things. Each song represents an idealized version of different times of the day in my mind. From the groggy yet glistening churn that is waking up every morning, to the carefree and freeing energy of being unplugged from work, to the penultimate playful charm of being up late — while reality often falls far from reaching those same expectations, I’ve learned to be content with less and greater appreciate more.


I invite you all to listen to my silly little tunes and hopefully find your own meaning in the loop. I really appreciate anyone who reads through this wall of text; it ended up being a lot longer than I had originally anticipated. Thank you for hearing what I had to say. I hope you enjoy the album and I hope you find content in your own life.


hippopop