Review
Some nineteen months after its January 2025 release, Maribou State's Hallucinating Love returns on Ninja Tune in a deluxe edition. The original was the London duo's first full-length in seven years, made during a stretch of personal hardship, and it found them leaning toward pop songcraft without dropping the chillwave-tinged electronica they have worked in since their 2013 debut.
The sound is built from physical parts. "Blackoak" opens on accordion and layered voices, with choir and orchestral swells folded around sampled material. "Bloom" runs on looped guitar and light, tropical-leaning percussion, while "Dance on the World" pushes into a brisker, 80s-tinged drive. The album moves through these shifts in roughly 38 minutes, and its quieter instrumental passages, a piano and cello figure and a late guitar solo, expose the writing more than the big choruses do.
The bonus material adds demos and remixes, and that is where the reissue has to justify itself. The original sequence still makes the stronger case, moving from introspective stretches to floor-leaning peaks with a cohesion that a pile of extras can easily disturb. Listeners who know the record are best served by hearing the additions as a look at how the songs were assembled, not as rival versions.
