CamelPhat return with 'Hope,' the first solo single on their own label

“Our first album Dark Matter came out of lockdown and from a really strange and surreal place for everyone,” CamelPhat has said.

Three years on, CamelPhat are back with something new. ‘Hope,’ released 9 June, arrives as CamelPhat’s first single released alone on their label, When Stars Align, and it follows April’s ‘Your Mind’ EP with Josh Gigante. It won’t stay alone on the label for long.

When Stars Align, still a young operation, is expected to put out the pair’s second studio album later this year, and ‘Hope’ may be an early sign of what’s on it. Max Milner, the musician and actor who starred in Netflix’s 2019 Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt, handles the vocal.

It’s a quieter turn than most CamelPhat features get: his voice floats over arpeggios and chords built to hover, not drive, and the opening stretch leans almost entirely on that voice and one melodic line. It’s a different lane than the duo’s usual sound. ‘Hope’ has already been slotted in as the opening track at CamelPhat’s festival and club sets.

CamelPhat, Grammy-nominated and multi-platinum, have been releasing music since 2010, and it’s been six years since ‘Cola’ broke out as the track most people still know them for. The duo now count billions of streams. Their live calendar shifted the same year: a 2022 residency at Ushuaïa gave way to a Tuesday night slot at Pacha, and the run stretched across twenty dates.