Hippopotamus is the 23rd studio album by American rock group Sparks. It was released on September 8, 2017, through BMG Rights Management and The End Records, their first record issued on a major label for decades.
Following the 2009 radio musical The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman and Sparks' subsequent collaboration with Franz Ferdinand in FFS, the release of Hippopotamus marked a return to the traditional Sparks format of "short, literate, witty pop songs", mixing elements from the band's various stylistic periods.
Hippopotamus was met with critical acclaim, and entered the UK Albums Chart at no. 7, Sparks' first UK top-ten appearance in over 40 years.
Background and recording
Having spent much of the past decade working on two musicals, radio production The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman and the movie musical Annette, a collaboration with French director Leos Carax, the Mael brothers set out to return to a more traditional song-oriented, rather than narrative, pop format for their next Sparks release, their interest in making such an album stoked by their recent collaboration with Franz Ferdinand. They worked on the album over a 10-month period, starting at the beginning of 2016 and ending in October, with most of the recording done in Russell Mael's home studio in Los Angeles.
Style
Stylistically, Hippopotamus was classified as baroque pop by journalist Claire Biddles, and simply rock by reviewer Sandy Lewis.
Music videos
The video by Joseph Wallace for the single "Edith Piaf (Said It Better Than Me)" featured stop-motion puppets modelled on the Mael brothers going on a surreal adventure in 1930s' Paris. It was well received by critics and fans as well as Sparks themselves, who have talked about plans to work with Wallace and puppet animation in future projects.
Release
The album was published via BMG rather than the Maels' own Lil' Beethoven label. BMG had just taken on the publishing rights for Sparks' back catalogue, which had come up for renewal. "Once we did a publishing deal with them," Russell Mael told PopMatters, "the record label side of BMG really was interested in listening to the new album. So they flew out from London and we played them the album and they just kind of flipped out and said, 'This is amazing, we need to do the record deal now as well.'" BMG signed the album worldwide. Sparks toured Europe and the United States in support of the album.
Reception
Hippopotamus has a score of 81 out of 100 on the review aggregator website Metacritic, based on 18 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". The album entered the UK charts at no. 7, Sparks' first top-ten appearance in the UK Albums Chart since Propaganda in 1974.