VINYL

LP is Standard Jacket, Printed Inner Sleeve, & Download Card.

CD is 4 Panel Digipack.

In the life of any interesting artist, there is the perpetual war between the simplicity of public perception and the complexities of reality. Consider Hanni El Khatib, a definitive purveyor of visceral, blues-wracked, punk-spiked, soul-warped, knife fight rock n’ roll over the last decade. You may be familiar with him through any one of his four acclaimed solo albums on Innovative Leisure, his work with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, or as one of the rare polymaths able to artfully blend serrated guitars and hardcore rap on collaborations with GZA and Freddie Gibbs. And while these are all real things that could accurately yield a sketch of the multi-dimensional Los Angeles-based artist, they amount to little more than a black and white pencil sketch. 

More compelling is the Hanni El Khatib of terrestrial existence, who is less susceptible to being pigeonholed by shrewd branding or capsule biography. There is the Hanni El Khatib who existed before he was a professional musician. This was the rap and punk-revering San Francisco skate rat, who grew up digging in the crates for samples to flip on his bedroom MPC -- who would eventually become the creative director for the venerable streetwear label HUF. There is the second chapter in which El Khatib moved to LA to pursue music full-time and almost immediately found himself embraced by KCRW and on tour with Florence and the Machine. Music supervisors synced his music in Audi commercials that  played at the Super Bowl. The LA Times said that El Khatib's voice is like “woodsmoke or bourbon, acrid yet sweet, as timeless as jeans and a T-shirt… versatile enough to make a classic sound fresh again.”  While across the pond, The Guardian claimed that El Khatib was like “if Joe Strummer came back as an angry young Filipino-Palestinian American.”

From 2010 until 2017, there was the usual cycle that consumes most working 21st musicians: make an album, and tour it for the next 18 months. Return home, rinse and repeat. And with it came the predictable pitfalls that ensnare too many artists whose professional obligations require high-octane performances before 1,000 or more strangers every night. It is a dream until that one night when it isn’t any longer, and despite his gratitude for his fans and station in life, El Khatib found himself wracked by depression and anxiety. What had once been joyous creative outlet felt like a job. In the wake of the release of 2017’s Savage Times, it became readily apparent that if El Khatib didn’t make drastic changes to his lifestyle, there might not be a life to speak of. So he quit drinking, stopped touring, and took an indefinite hiatus from the studio. 

With music temporarily out of the picture, El Khatib returned to one of his first loves: design. Partnering with his longtime friend and former employer Keith Hufnagel of HUF, El Khatib founded Metropolitan, a popular skateboard brand that recently did a collaborative run with Adidas.  But eventually, the desire to create songs slowly returned. It helped that El Khatib purposely downsized his living arrangements, moving out of a spacious house with a well-appointed studio in Beachwood Canyon into a smaller dwelling with a bedroom lab that mirrored the cramped confines of how El Khatib first began making music as a teenager. 

What would eventually become El Khatib’s fifth studio album, the virtuosic but characteristically raw Flightbegan as spontaneous experimentation. Over the last several years, El Khatib had become close friends with Leon Michels, best known as the mastermind of the soul controllers, the El Michels Affair, but who has also quietly racked up producer credits for the likes of pop juggernauts like Lana Del Rey, Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky, and Eminem -- as well as frequently working in sessions with Grammy-winning super-producer Mark Ronson. 

At first, their jams were intended as riffs and breaks for other producers to sample, but quickly, El Khatib decided to say fuck the middleman. Why create samples, when they could create the entire beat themselves? The process unfolded casually and organically. El Khatib took a few trips to Michels’ studio in upstate New York, and when Michels would come to LA to produce the new Chicano Batman record or to work with Ronson, he’d steal away an afternoon to help create Flight. 

The finished result is a rollicking sampledelic opus that recalls the beautiful chaos that the Dust Brothers created on Paul’s Boutique and Odelay. Or maybe the euphoric bricolage of the Avalanches’ Since I Left You crossed with the aggrieved darkness of the early Prodigy. Of course, it’s all filtered through the singular style that El Khatib has developed over the previous ten years. Take a song like “Room,” the first finished song on the album. Built off a scuzzy drum break and hypnotic pianos, the pair of  El Khatib and Michels recorded it live to tape, then sampled it through outboard gear into the computer a la Portishead. Then they put it in Ableton, chopped the hell out of it, re-edited it and stitched back together into a collage. It’s the type of thing that Dilla and Madlib would’ve created if they had come up on The Cramps. 

The creative process was governed by whatever helped them move through the compositions quickly. If they got stuck, they’d delete it. Because El Khatib wasn’t concerned with the need to perform the songs live, it unlocked a new level. So rather than blistering guitar attacks, you might hear two drum samples, a live flute, and a weird fucked up tape loop that could never be played live. It’s creativity for its own sake, the only type that’s really important. A song like “Dumb” plays out like post-modern minimalist doo-wop written for a Spaghetti Western reboot that needed a new Morricone score. “Alive” is a levitative groove with a narcotic jazz piano riff built atop a bruised but euphoric vocal that asks, slightly dumbfounded, “I can’t believe I survived.” And yes, “Stressy” has a ghostride the whip reference because you can take the artist out of the Bay but…

The irony, of course, is that for a record that sounds like little else El Khatib has ever done, it’s the most complete embodiment of who he is as an artist. It’s a record both dense and intricate yet direct and spontaneous. It is garage rock, it is hip-hop, it is soul, it is blues, it is psychedelic, but more than anything, it’s a brilliant Hanni El Khatib record -- one that taps into the adolescent spirit of creation that first stirred him to make songs in the first place. Here he is on his fifth album, back for the first time. 

CD Packaging is a 4-Panel Digipack.

LP Packaging is a Tip-On Jacket w/ Digital Download Card & Poster Insert.

On his 2011 debut Will The Guns Come Out, Hanni El Khatib tried something he’d never tried before—making a bedroom-style recording of his then stripped-to-the-skeleton guitar-and-drums rock ‘n’ roll mostly for the sheer joy of making it. For his ferocious 2013 follow-up Head In The Dirt, he tried something new again, showing up at producer Dan Auerbach’s analog-dreamland Nashville studio with nothing but the clothes on his back and an open mind.

But after Head In The Dirt’s release and almost a year of relentless touring, Hanni knew he needed to go past ‘unpredictable’ all the way to ‘unprecedented.’ He needed isolation, time and the chance to experiment. So after 30 days locked in hand-picked L.A. studio the Lair, the result is the albumMoonlight (Jan 20, 2015 Release Date)—the rarest and most welcome kind of album, made at that perfect point in life where confidence, experience, and technique unite to help an artist do anything they want.

That’s why it starts with a song that sounds like a Mobb Deep beat under a Suicide-style synth drone and ends with an ESG-meets-LCD Soundsystem gone italo-disco song about life and death. That’s why it collides crushing crate-digger drumbeats that’d be right at home on a Can LP or an Eddie Bo 45 with bleeding distorto guitar, bent and broken barroom piano and hallucinatory analog flourishes. (In fact, some smart producer is going to sample the drums from this album and complete the circle of life.) And that’s also why Moonlight feels like the album he’s always wanted to make: “What would it sound like if RZA got in the studio with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits?” he asks. “I don’t know! That was my approach on everything.”

To make Moonlight, he needed the right engineer and the right place to record, the kind of place where they’d understand when he’d ask for ’62 Slingerland drumkit and obsolete fuzz pedals. And he found it in the Lair and engineer Sonny DiPerri, whose pinpoint instincts and unassuming personality camouflaged an all-star resume including stints with Trent Reznor to Avey Tare (Animal Collective) to Giorgio Moroder.

So on April 1st of 2014, Hanni sat down with his live drummer Ron Marinelli and a selection of heavy friends to translate his best ideas to tape. As the album developed, Hanni found himself playing almost everything, switching from guitar to bass to synth to Mellotron—sometimes several times during the course of a song—and even sampling and re-editing Marinelli’s beats.

It’s a personal album in the most primal sense, put together in any way that worked. Iggy Pop and David Bowie did this kind of thing on The Idiot, the Wu-Tang Clan did it on 36 Chambers and The Clash did it three times over on Sandinista. And now it’s Hanni’s turn, across 11 new lightning-struck songs, each written and recorded in its own flash of inspiration. It sounds like an album made by an endless list of collaborators, but really Moonlight was more like the first do-it-almost-all-yourself music Hanni ever made, except after six years recording and touring, he’d learned to do so much more.

“My approach is still the same,” he explains. “Do things you’ve never done before. Challenge yourself. Be free and be creative. The same thing holds true for everything I’ve ever done, whether painting or design or skateboarding or whatever. Do it for the right reasons—exploring yourself. That’s what it’s about.”

Los Angeles based Hanni El Khatib grew up in San Francisco raised on skateboarding (former creative director at HUF), punk rock, and 1950s and 60s classic Americana. Influenced by pioneers of early rock and R&B, the multi-instrumentalist and producer derives his unique sound from a menagerie of inspirations: blues, soul, garage rock, doo-wop … and the most American thing of all, car wrecks. It's malt shop music for those who drink them spiked with bourbon or in Hanni's own words "these songs were written for anyone who's ever been shot or hit by a train. Knife fight music." No word yet on whether Hanni's tested that knife fight thing at any of his shows.

Will The Guns Come Out is his debut album on the Innovative Leisure label, following two 45s: Dead Wrong & Build Destroy Rebuild.

LP is Limited-Edition Custom Hardcover Booklet with Three 10" Vinyl LP's & Download Card.

CD is 4 Panel Digipack.

Hanni El Khatib’s first idea for his Savage Times project was to do something he’d never done before. Instead, he ended up doing … well, everything he’d never done before. He’d be playing new instruments, writing in unfamiliar new ways, opening himself up to an unrelenting stream of ideas and dedicating himself totally to pure musical instinct.  And the result? 19 best-of-the-sessions songs, destined for vinyl release as a Limited Edition 10” LP Box Set, as well as the kind of creative revelations that only happen when you quit looking around and start looking ahead.

Originally, he’d hoped to explode the lingering idea that he was simply a blues-rock guitar player, but that’s why Savage Times touches on everything from garage rock to punk to disco, hip-hop and even some unexpected solo-guitar self-portraiture. But on the way, he also exploded his own idea of what he could do—even maybe who he was, or would be.  Savage Times was an experiment as well as an experience, that touched on some of the most personal, social & political elements to date.