Hugo

There’s an aura of late night heat and mystery in the music of Hugo. For him, Old Tyme Religion isn’t just another album title – it’s an apt summation of a certain conviction that continuously embeds itself in his story, and in his songs. His real life experiences have taken him from the Mekong River jungle to the booth of a favorite Thai restaurant in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood he has made home. His spiritual and musical sojourns have led to Old Tyme Religion, a lyrically provocative, tunefully hook-filled unconventional pop debut. "I'm trying to make rock & roll in the age of hip-hop," he affirms. "A complete thought in 3 minutes and 30 seconds, that's the challenge. A song is a planet with gravity and atmosphere and things living in it. An album is a solar system."

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Born in England and raised in Thailand, Hugo -- a seriously dedicated songwriter, musician and performer -- has already plowed through several aesthetic incarnations on the road to Old Tyme Religion. As a young teen in Thailand, he achieved nationwide success by cutting four studio albums with Siplor, "a hick band with a mission,” whose charge against ‘the man’ resulted in a couple of their records being banned on the radio. Reflecting on this experience, he realized how formative and insular his Thai musical experiences had been. "The records I was making in Thailand, in isolation from American culture, were made as if we were still in the 70s. Nothing after 1977, Elvis wasn't dead, punk never happened. Thailand has this hangover from the 60s and 70s. The juke boxes had Creedence Clearwater Revival, anything that had a bit of heat to it looked right and sounded right through the cicadas and the mosquitoes, heavy into that swampy dark ominous thing.”

Committed to bringing his music to the rest of the world, Hugo cut through the heat and humidity and journeyed to London. He went on an extensive blues exploration, listening to Howling Wolf, Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James. "The guys that sometimes when they were singing, they didn't sound like people," explains Hugo. He wasn't looking for beer commercial blues; he was hunting down "the Mississippi Delta stuff, the country blues, that whole atmosphere." He began working his way through pop sounds post-1977, citing Appetite For Destruction, Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Jeff Buckley, MGMT, Tame Impala, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Devendra Banhart, The Big Pink and "anything Jack White touches" as exemplary for the period. To Hugo, the putative conflict between the mainstream and the underground dissolves when the quality of the music is high enough. "The Doors were a mainstream band," he states, "and no one would doubt their credibility or importance. I think the Doors are as 'arty' as anything more obscure; same with the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones.” This fine line between accessibility and intrigue is where Hugo’s music naturally falls. “That's the pop medium I'm trying to work in. I don't see myself as alternative or indie or anything like that at all. I consider myself to be making mainstream music. That's what I want to do, play for people that like the material."