A real conversation with Noah Dillon

“Sorry for being long winded, I’m really good at just saying a lot of nothing sometimes,” Noah Dillon says. It’s a slightly misguided apology. The problem with interviewing Dillon isn’t that his words are empty, it’s that he has so much to say that you feel a slight sense of dread thinking about the size of the pending transcript.

He’s calling from a nondescript London hotel on a rare night off in late November. Last night, The Hellp supported 2hollis – for whom Dillon has made multiple music videos – at Brixton Academy, before hitting the ultra-trendy afterparty. Last week, the duo dropped Riviera, their expansive second album with Atlantic records. And earlier last month, Dillon’s photography career hit a milestone when Rosalía announced her neoclassical odyssey album Lux, revealing the cover was shot by Dillon. The Hellp have been all over my TikTok FYP for weeks. It all looks incredibly exciting. And exhausting.

Raised in a working-class, strictly-religious household in the small city of Durgano, Colorado, Dillon never felt entitled to finding success in the arts. ​“It seemed like the only thing I could do was construction,” he remembers. ​“Maybe the best case scenario was to be like a lawyer or something like that. But even that seemed too lofty.” Still, as a teenager, he experimented with photography and his own T‑shirt brand, eventually forming The Hellp in 2015, with Eddie Liaboh, after he enrolled at a nearby college.

The Hellp’s fans still love some of those early songs. Although the recordings are sketchy and the songwriting feels a little naive, there’s a profoundly bittersweet feeling to scuzzy indie-punk tracks such as Wingspan and Confluence. Chandler Ransom Lucy joined The Hellp in 2016 and Eddie left in 2018, and over the years The Hellp’s music gradually morphed towards a more danceable glitchpop sound. In the meantime, Dillon’s photography and video work piqued the interest of Virgil Abloh, Luka Sabbat and Frank Ocean.

Thanks to their skinny jeans and nostalgia for the alternative music of the late ​’00s-early ​’10s, The Hellp lit the fuse for the so-called ​“indie sleaze” revival of the 2020s, which saw fashion-conscious indie kids play around with synths and make up for lost time in the club as soon as lockdown lifted.

But like a poorly-tailored leather jacket, the indie sleaze tag never quite fit The Hellp. Riviera should outlive the fad. Its songs are too polished and sophisticated to sound like they were pinned to a MySpace page in 2008. Opening with the explosive drum fills and the deep post-rock riffage of Revenge of the Mouse Diva, Country Road then provides a prowling club beat primed for massive soundsystems. On electropop anthems like Here I Am and Live Forever, The Hellp are in high definition, executing a style of digital Americana that’s sad, sexy and star-gazing.

Over the course of our conversation, Dillon opened up about his hopes and fears for The Hellp, his work with Rosalía and what the future might hold for him as an artist. The interview has been condensed for clarity.

How did Colorado shape you as an artist and as a musician?

With photography, I’m still not very good at taking close-up pictures of people or things. I like the Donna Trope style of photography and I’m so fascinated by it, because it’s very foreign to me. And it’s because, one: I have a hard time with intimacy in terms of physical closeness; but also, because when I started photographing it was landscapes. Hike up to the mountains, go down south to the Badlands in New Mexico on the native reservation, go to Arches National Park in Utah – very, very, very wide, huge landscapes.

This completely informs the music of The Hellp, too. When I started the band, the most recognisable song at this point was SSX, and it’s such a sprawling, large song. And that was what I was experiencing then. I was very isolated under very large skies.

So you formed The Hellp in 2015. What was going on in your life at the time?

I was in love. I found what I thought my purpose was, and it was the honeymoon period of intense work ethic and obsession. Late 2014: make clothing, shoot this lookbook. Early 2015: realise I’m good at it, start shooting an insane amount of photographs, start getting noticed online. Luka Sabbat noticed me on Twitter, and [later in 2016] we started this project together called Hot Mess.

Around July or August in 2015, I just woke up one morning and I thought, what am I going to regret on my deathbed? And music was, like, the most important thing to me in high school. So I thought that I would really, really regret it if I wasn’t in a cool band.

I started it with this guy Eddie Liaboh. I was 19 or 20 at the time, and Eddie was in high school. You know, no one’s ever talked about Eddie, because it’s not part of the modern canon. And like, who gives a fuck? But to me, it matters, because he was the guy I started the band with, and he and I are the ones who established the language for what The Hellp is. He was honestly brilliant. After school, Eddie and I would meet at my college. It’s on this plateau that overlooks the town, and in the distance, you see 14,000 foot peaks, and it’s quite picturesque and beautiful, honestly. But you hate the place because everybody hates you, and you know they’re calling you slurs. Eddie and I would record in the bathroom to use the reverb. We made the first album Twin Sinner.

I made 10 music videos for Twin Sinner. I drove to LA with Eddie and two skater kids I’d met. In 10 days, we made 10 videos that I directed, and nine of the videos were shit. And one of them, in my opinion, was genius.

The Confluence video was filmed at 6am on Thanksgiving morning in 2016, when we were driving back from LA. It’s me running down the desert naked in Monument Valley [on the Arizona-Utah border]. I vividly remember coming home and my parents freaking out, like, ​‘you’ve been doing drugs in LA for 10 days, you’re disgraced, you’re going to hell!’ And I’m like, ​‘you guys do not understand what I’m doing, I’m literally working so hard.’ But you know how parents are sometimes.

Is it true that Frank Ocean and Kanye picked up on what you were doing?

It’s true. I just kind of don’t like to talk about it. Somebody who was very close to Frank during Blonde came up to me at the FYF festival in LA in 2017. It was at Frank’s set, we were in the artist section, and he told me [the Confluence video] was a big inspiration for Frank. I’d just moved to LA.

I know Kanye, I’ve consulted for him and whatnot. He was on some private jet, I guess, listening to a Hellp song called Beacon 002, because he’s always trying to listen to new stuff, just like those videos of him listening to Jeans by 2hollis or Nettspend when he’s getting his hair cut. But I don’t necessarily know if Kanye even liked the music. Probably not really, since he’s never talked to me about my music.

How did The Hellp’s music develop?

Twin Sinner was indie rock. I was inspired by the Burger Records scene and all the stuff that was going on in California, and I wanted to be a part of it, at least from afar. But the day Twin Sinner dropped, I knew I needed to pivot. I wanted to make the music that I was really inspired by, the stuff that I just missed out on. I graduated high school in like 2013 or 2014, [my upbringing] was really Catholic, so I never was allowed out to sleep over [and I was] very, segregated from reality, so I missed out on the indie sleaze of it all. The Crystal Castles, the Animal Collectives. I wanted to almost reclaim that in my own way. So started making electronic music the day [Twin Sinner] dropped.

I was really M83 inspired. I made huge synthesiser landscapes mixed with Crystal Castles, vocal chops and the idea of the American West, like [Bruce Springsteen’s album] Nebraska, and just the feeling of isolation. I wanted shit to be lit, almost club-adjacent. I wanted it to be like iPod commercial music, in the best way possible. And it took years and years to figure that out. But along the way, it created the groundwork for everybody else to make music like that. Like, there’s the signature synth sound that everyone uses now, like these very specific saw synths, and the vocal chops – it’s all The Hellp. And I know people love to roast me for saying that online. Like, who does this guy think he is? Whatever. I don’t care. I’ve lived life. I know what it is.

[For a long time with The Hellp], I was chasing the tail of a specific thing I could never quite figure out. And other people almost figured it out before I was able to figure it out. But in the journey of doing so, I learned different lessons. We kind of fucked up on [The Hellp’s 2024 album] LL a little bit.

How do you mean?

It was just over produced. Like, on purpose. I spammed Splice sounds for 30 – 45 minutes every time I was in the studio, really loud in front of everybody. It’s almost like I wanted to be as dumb as I fucking could, like just be stupid, so that it could hopefully make like something that felt a bit more juvenile and more like lit and clubby And that’s fine. But maybe that isn’t exactly what The Hellp is. And there were too many songs on the record. But it did what it needed to do, more or less.

The essence of Riviera is much more of what I am, [rather] than trying to almost be this performative indie sleaze band – which we’ve never [actually] tried to do. It’s just the box people have put us in. And I kind of wish we were those people. It would be really cool if I just loved to do drugs and being super hedonistic and I didn’t really care, and made banging songs. But that’s just so not what this is.

It’s interesting listening to Riviera and then listening back to your old stuff. There’s an amateur feel to those early Hellp records, and now it’s as if you’ve fully realised those ideas, but the essence is the same. If you compare the Confluence video with the video for [Riviera single] Live Forever, there’s obviously a bigger budget and you’ve developed your skills, but the key ingredients and the flavour is still there, right?

I had the ideas for the Live Forever video since 2019. It’s not that I’m disappointed in the video – like, yeah, I could have been executed a little bit better, and maybe if I had more money, I could have done this angle etcetera – but the ideas you have in the moment that are executed with nearest are the ones that truly live forever. So the video kind of felt stale to me.

But there is a throughline, for sure, between all of these videos and feelings. It’s kind of annoying, because it’s like, man, am I ever gonna grow the fuck up? I hate to bring up the internet all the time – but it’s such a pervasive part of our life that kind of defines who we are, for better for worse at this point. People online will say be like ​‘oh so embarrassing’ like these are just 30 year olds acting like high schoolers still’ and you know, you’re not totally wrong. Somehow I’m still working through and chewing the cud of a lot of the same issues I had when I was that age. So I haven’t necessarily evolved past that state. However, the production and the professionalism has evolved.

When the band was first made, there was so much passion and a tumultuous nature and [this feeling of] how am I going to get through this? It’s not like that now, but it’s almost like the afterglow of those things are still being sort of rehashed. Anthony Fantano, who just gave Riviera a really poor rating, because he doesn’t understand The Hellp. If you have an opinion about us, you need to know the context.

Riviera is a good example, at least production wise, of more of the world in which we need to be living in. But I think it’s sort of my duty [to try and do that] I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to be in music, or if it’s going to be in another medium. Probably another medium, because I’m best at other mediums. I produce most of [The Hellp’s music] and then it’s kind of finished off by Chandler or Trey or other people that we bring in. So these are all my ideas, and it’s who I am. But I don’t know if it’s like the best vehicle. And I always say that I want to quit the band. People ask me, ​‘Well, why would you do that? You’re about to blow up, blah, blah, blah.’ And people think, ​‘Oh, why can’t he just be grateful that [they’ve] sold out North America. And I’m like, ​‘that’s not my metric of success.’ My metric of success is being an artist. And I want to effectively communicate what I have to say with the most poignant, distinct medium and the best medium possible. And I just feel like music is not necessarily that medium, like I’m not super gifted songwriter or musician. Whereas in the visual world, like video or photography or other other mediums, even even sculptural stuff like I’m much better at getting my point across in a very poignant way.

I think you’re a bit hard on yourself at times. You’ve successfully managed to cut through in an oversaturated world where attention spans are depleted and people are desensitised to music and art. The Noah Dillon signature really is quite emotive. You must be about to see that in the audience’s reaction at The Hellp’s shows?

I do recognise that it is being well received. And who cares if Fantano gave it a five [out of ten], and who cares if some person doesn’t get it? But the only reason I really started all of this is because I just want to be great. I want to be remembered for more than whatever it is I’m remembered for now. We all have that dream.

I do think Riveira is an achievement and I do think it is one of the best releases of the year. And there’s been a lot of good music this year. It’s honestly been kind of almost like a music renaissance, for lack of better word. There’s been so many good records released, and a lot of good artists, kind of new and old coming together. And I think Riveira can stand can stand with kind of the best of them. So it’s a great achievement for Chandler and I to have done that, especially after, after all these years of just not really being successful

I’d agree that the last couple of years has been an exciting time for music. And I think when people who are 24-years-old now are 40, they’ll have a lot of nostalgia for this era – they’ll look back on listening to The Hellp, wearing Mowalola, and fakemink dropping a banger every other week…

That’s why I’m still doing it. Because I’m hoping that when they make the [next] Meet Me in the Bathroom in 20 years, that I’ll be a prominent figure in it, or at least mentioned in some sort of way. Because, if you go to a 2hollis show, it’s insane. People are losing their minds, and clearly that’s like a defining moment of their adolescence. And there’s definitely people who feel that way about us, and Cameron Winter and fakemink and Smerz, and EsDeeKid, Yves Tumor, Rosalía – all these great people making music and art right now.

I was satisfied [with The Hellp] by 2020. We played a show in New York to 200 people, everyone there was starry-eyed. It was a very special moment. You could feel it in the room. It was unlike anything. And that was like the new era in New York. Like, we’re doing the thing again – even though it wasn’t what we’re trying to copy at all – but, you know, the guys in jackets, The Strokes or Interpol, but we’re doing it electronically. So after that, I was good. We can quit. I don’t give a fuck. It’s time to move on to something else. But Atlantic Records came knocking, and then it’s kind of hard to say no to that.

Everything about Rosalía’s album Lux seems so meticulously considered. So for her to choose you to shoot the artwork is very flattering. How did that feel?

I’m honoured that she would even consider me. Every image is in the vinyl, like 80 images [are shot by me] and the cover, and I did a video for her. Like you said, she’s so particular and one of the most artistically specific people in the game. When they reached out, I was kind of shocked. Usually when you deal with an artist that large, you walk into the meeting and there’s this assistant and the A&R and you’re not actually talking to the artist or anybody close to them. But I walk into this restaurant in LA and it’s just Rosalía and her sister Pilar. And they’re so bright-eyed, curious and nice, like, very special people. There’s a reason why Rosalía’s a star. She’s extremely special. This meeting went really well. For whatever reason I was being charismatic. Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. I remember they’re like, ​‘we were afraid to meet you. We thought that you were going to be so mean!’ Everybody thinks I’m going to be some mean kind of guy. But we just really got along.

Looking to the near future, The Hellp is going on the road again. You guys play live and DJ a lot. Do you enjoy it, or is it tough?

I hate it. There’s nothing worse. I don’t know how artists do it. I don’t think anybody’s good at it. Everyone I’ve talked to in the industry hates touring. It’s really difficult. It’s impossible to get anything done. My health has already been bad my whole life – like really bad – and it just makes it worse. And you have to try deliver to the fans what they deserve. Because they’ve attached memories and feelings and ideas and parts of who they are to your music. And so you’re experiencing that and expressing that to them live.

I’m always crouched over on stage because I just hate people looking at me. I love the attention, but I also hate it at the same time. Chandler likes the stage. He’s much more in his element there. And he likes touring more than I do too. But for me it’s really, it’s really, really difficult. I go to bed past 1am one night, and for like three days [I’m] shot after that.

I’m breaking my own rule here – because I promised myself that I wouldn’t utter the words ​“indie sleaze” in front of you – but has that made things harder, in the sense that you might feel you need to live up to preconceptions of you being a party boy?

I mean, people probably might think I am, just because now I’ve said, ​‘fuck it’ and I just go hang out and suffer the consequences. But I’m hoping that I’m going to take two or three months off and hopefully reset everything. I pushed it so far over the past 10 years that it’s almost unresolvable. On one hand, I’m kind of masochistic. But if you looked at my backpack that I bring everywhere, it’s just full of supplements.

So, yeah, it is disheartening when people, especially young people, are going to see one interview of these two guys with sunglasses and leather jackets saying we’re the best band ever, or whatever, and of course, [they’re] gonna immediately say, like, ​‘okay, these guys are losers who are pushing 40’. I’ve kind of had that my whole adult life – a lot of people’s first impressions of me, they hate me, even if I don’t really say anything. So that just seems to be the misconception.

I’m just not PR trained. Never cared about it. It’s been offered a lot of times, and of course, like the label wanted it and etc. Just say what you say, mean what you say, or don’t. It’s like that Ralph Waldo Emerson essay The Over-Soul, where he [writes that] men are only men because we contradict ourselves every other day – one day you believe this, the next day you believe that, and that’s why you’re a man. That’s kind of what I believe. What do we know? Like, I don’t know, I don’t fucking know anything. I try to make some cool stuff. Have some opinions. And the worst case scenario in this wild, existential, disillusioning world we live in, I gotta just at least pretend to believe to the public that I’m cool and I’m making something important.