Caroline Chang
When things get dark, sometimes the only option is to make your own light. That’s exactly what British electronic duo Maribou State did with Hallucinating Love (released January 31), their first full-length album in nearly seven years, and their most emotional, luminous record to date.
Written during a tough stretch filled with health crises, pandemic isolation, and the mental fallout of being on the road, the record became their way of working through the weight of it all and what came out is a vision of hope. Floating between airy vocals and organic-feeling electronica beats, the record delivers a cohesive, retro-leaning, radiant yet downtempo sound that marks a turning point in the duo’s career.
“Previously, we’d never really written emotional music. We’d come at it from a place of making electronic and club music,” Liam Ivory of Maribou State told LA Weekly. “For this record, we were metabolizing all of the horrible experiences and they were ending up in the music. With electronic music, it’s quite a tricky thing to get your feelings out into. But because we were still creating across this whole period of feeling really low and all these different emotions, it ended up being a really emotional record. And that’s not something we’ve ever really done before.”
Maribou State performing at the Roxy Theatre, Wednesday, April 16, 2025 (Caroline Chang @carochangcreative)
With a new sound and fresh perspective, Maribou State have set out on their first tour in nearly six years, bearing the light of Hallucinating Love from London to the Coachella Valley. We caught up with the duo of Liam and Chris Davids ahead of their Wednesday night Los Angeles tour stop at The Roxy Theatre, sandwiched in the middle of their two-weekend Coachella debut.
LA Weekly: The title Hallucinating Love, I think it’s really beautiful. It feels a bit surreal. Where did that phrase come from?
Chris: I’d written a lyric for a song that was on the album that’s called “I Remember,” and that was one of the lyrics that just didn’t end up getting used. Liam and I throughout the writing process had both been struggling quite a lot, both mental and physical health. The process of writing the album was quite a challenge, but all the time we were writing it, all the music that was coming out was really quite hopeful and felt like the opposite of what we were experiencing at the time. And that lyric, “hallucinating love,” just popped back up into our minds, and we both decided that just felt at the right title of the record.
So that time you took off writing the record — the six or seven years between your last release, your last tour, and now — you’ve been pretty candid about the fact that you both had some personal challenges in that time. Talk me through that. What were the pivotal points during that time, and how did that inform the project?
Liam: Our journeys have been very different, but also there’s been so many similarities. There’s been times when we’ve been really off-kilter but in sync with each other. I think the thing that set the trajectory originally was finishing touring in 2019. It was really high-octane. We were touring loads. The project had leveled up quite a lot. We were partying a lot, we weren’t sleeping a lot, we weren’t looking after ourselves, physically or mentally. We came off the tour intentionally at the back end of 2019, and then obviously COVID hit, and we were just grounded. I think that started the ripple effect where there was a huge fallout from that tour.
It was that initial period where I think we started feeling some issues with mental health. And from that point, this is where the journeys get quite separate and personal. My anxiety has just got worse and worse, and it just really channeled into health anxiety, and just a real lack of purpose. I was really struggling with who I was and where I was at in life. And then at the same time, Chris was going through personal mental, but also physical health stuff.
Chris: All of that ended up getting quite tangled up with being creative and trying to find creativity amongst that period of struggle. That really informed the way that we were writing at the time. We were both trying to change the way that we looked after ourselves, and just really change our lifestyles during that period. It was a massive transition.
Liam: In hindsight, there’s actually a lot of gratitude I have for having to dig out of that hole that we were in. It’s mental to think now how I was pre that moment, but I was so ignorant to the therapy, so ignorant to meditation, so ignorant to the nervous system, to good diet — like it was just quite crazy how we were just cruising around. I was personally not really caring about repercussions. And actually, now I’m so grateful, because I think if I’d have carried on on that path — let’s say COVID didn’t happen, and we went straight back into the studio and then touring again — who knows where it would have ended up. It was this big reset for me, where I started learning so much about myself.
Maribou State performing at the Roxy Theatre, Wednesday, April 16, 2025 (Caroline Chang @carochangcreative)
The album feels very luminous, radiant, and almost expansive. It’s really interesting to hear that came out of such a dark time in your lives. Talk me through the process of pulling out of this dark place and producing this record that’s so full of light.
Chris: When I look back at it now, it seems really hard to see how we were able to do that. I think now we’re both in a place now where our mirrors are more reflective of how the album sounds. But I suppose a lot of it was done on these writing trips where we’d get away with like me, Liam and maybe some friends, and we’d take ourselves into a place, an environment that felt really safe and comfortable. We just went about doing everything within our power to try to remove ourselves from how we were feeling and just focus on writing music that also probably felt quite healing and cathartic. And I think, if we were gone down there, we started writing music that felt really heavy, maybe that,
Liam: We would’ve spiraled, probably.
Chris: Yeah, so that was how it started. It didn’t start intentionally at all. But then as we got further through writing, like a couple of years in, we were like, “Okay, this really feels like this is the kind of direction that this is heading in.”
Now that you’re playing this music out for people all over the world, how does it feel to take this record that was just yours for so long and share it with everyone?
Liam: Yeah, it’s been amazing. The key thing on this album, which didn’t happen on the last one, is that it was finished quite a long time before we started touring. On Kingdom in Colour [the duo’s sophomore album], we basically finished the record and went into rehearsals two days later. So there’s been this separation, which I think has been really important for me because the writing process was so tricky. I actually, quite frankly, hated the record. At least hated the process of making the music. By the time we finished it, I didn’t want to be in a studio. I didn’t want to listen to any of the music. So having the break was really good, because now since stepping out and doing the shows, it’s felt so exciting to share the music. The music really does come alive when you perform it.
Has touring it brought any kind of unexpected meaning to the record, seeing it reflected in people? Does it feel cathartic playing it out?
Chris: Yeah, definitely. I think when you see certain fans in the crowd getting really emotional, that’s a bit of a moment for us where we’re like, “Wow, this stuff, this music, really does resonate with people in a way that we didn’t ever anticipate when we were writing it.” I think similar to what Liam was saying, I had quite heavy emotions that were attached to the album, like ones that actually felt quite uncomfortable for a long time after it was done. I never really listened to it. I couldn’t listen to it and get much pleasure from it. And it’s actually only been since touring that that’s started to lift and it’s reinvigorated it.
Liam: The slate’s been wiped clean now, I guess, isn’t it? Since now we’re playing it live, it’s almost like you have to let go of it as being this personal thing. It’s not yours anymore. It’s out there and it’s for everybody to enjoy, or to not enjoy. For me, it’s like a fresh start on it.
Maribou State performing at the Roxy Theatre, Wednesday, April 16, 2025 (Caroline Chang @carochangcreative)
You’ve just played Coachella which must be a big milestone. How did that feel — coming back to LA, going out to Indio, and stepping onto that stage?
Liam: It felt really good. We have never been particularly drawn to the festival, I guess just had no experiences with it. We were actually quite nervous about our set because they typically released the set times quite late, and we only found out only a week before that we were on early in the daytime. Then we saw the weather was going to be stupidly hot, and we were all feeling like maybe this is gonna be the perfect storm where there’s not going to be anybody there. I was really worried about that. I had kind of accepted in my head that it might not be that great a show. But then when we stepped out, the tent was full. Everyone played really well. Everyone really enjoyed it. And the crowd looked like they were having the best time ever.
Coachella draws a lot of people into new music. What do you hope someone stumbling upon your set this coming weekend would take away from seeing Hallucinating Love live for the first time?
Chris: I hope that they would come away and feel some sort of joy or excitement, or just get some of the same feelings that we got out of it at the end of the record. Especially because we’re playing at the start of the day, I really hope that people just stumbled across it and are like, “Wow, that’s really set the tone for the day.” That it gives them a lift.
Liam And maybe also give them a little bit of that sense of hope and resilience that we had with it. If they’re having not a particularly good time in life, maybe it can give them a bit of a boost, or make them feel a little re-energized.
Any favorite moments from the tour?
Liam: Something that’s resonating a lot with me is, for some reason, I’m visually locking on to a lot of people when we play “Blackoak” and they’re singing the lyrics. And they’re really singing, like clenching their fists and swinging their heads back. It’s been amazing to see that and to see that it’s having an impact. You can see that’s not someone just singing along because it’s catchy. They’re singing along because that really means something to them, and that’s something I’ve only noticed since we’ve been out here in the US.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Maribou State upcoming tour dates:
April 18, Indio, CA (USA) – Coachella Music Festival Weekend 2
April 23, Salt Lake City, UT (USA) – The Depot
April 24, Denver, CO (USA) – Ogden Theatre
April 25, Kansas City, MO (USA) – The Truman
April 26, Minneapolis, MN (USA) – First Avenue
April 30, Chicago, IL (USA) – Concord Music Hall
May 1, Detroit, MI (USA) – The Majestic Theatre
May 2, Toronto, ON (Canada) – History
May 3, Montreal, QC (Canada) – Théâtre Beanfield
May 7, Philadelphia, PA (USA) – Union Transfer
May 8, Boston, MA (USA) – Royale Boston
May 9, New York, NY (USA) – Terminal 5
May 10, Washington, DC (USA) – 9:30 Club
May 13, Raleigh, NC (USA) – Lincoln Theatre
May 14, Atlanta, GA (USA) – Terminal West
May 16, Austin, TX (USA) – Emo’s Austin
May 17, Dallas, TX (USA) – The Echo Lounge & Music Hall
July 3–5, Werchter (Belgium) – Rock Werchter Festival
July 10–12, Birmingham (UK) – Mostly Jazz, Funk & Soul Festival
July 23–25, Southwold (UK) – Latitude Festival
August 24, Margate (UK) – Dreamland