Though not brothers, Adam Hunter and Sam Hunter of Glasgow-based electropop duo Hyyts have shared a bond since childhood that has sustained them by a meandering path to the brink of success. Singer and lyricist Adam studied musical theatre in Edinburgh, earlier than shifting to London in a thwarted try to turn out to be a singer-songwriter, then returning to Scotland to work as a musical therapist in prisons. Sam, in the meantime, spent a while as an expert gamer, and graduated from selling area of interest dance and electronica nights in Edinburgh to producing his personal tracks.
In 2015, not lengthy after they began making music collectively, Adam moved to Dundee to work on a movie soundtrack with Gary Clark, former frontman of 80s pop band Danny Wilson, and Sam got here alongside too. Hyyts’s sound was honed over two years dwelling within the metropolis.
Like a traditional fire-and-ice duo, Sam informed the Dundee Courier: “Opposites attracted with us. Adam’s received a large flavour for large pop, generally verging on the tacky… whereas I’m listening to bizarre, 30-year-old industrial techno from Yugoslavia or wherever.” Like fellow Glaswegian synth lovers and vowel-substituters Chvrches, Hyyts’s music walks the road between underground electronica and the pure pop rush of Muna or The 1975. Their sound is pushed to euphoric heights by Adam’s unabashedly soulful, hovering vocals on the likes of SOS, in regards to the pressures of masculinity, and the twitchy, garage-inflected Lonely Individuals, in regards to the psychological toll of the pandemic. Their new EP, Helluvatime, paperwork a relationship in reverse, from the poignant afterimage of Unhealthy Tattoo to the wealthy, romantic rush of Maintain on Cowboy, a neat trick designed to go away the listener besotted. It really works.
Helluvatime is out 18 June; Hyyts play a house city present at Glasgow King Tut’s on 26 August
