The Hellp: “We Believe What We Represent”

This story is taken from the Summer/Autumn 2026 issue of Another Man, Volume II, Issue V:

Noah Dillon has spent five minutes monologuing about how he’s constantly being questioned for his choices. How people don’t believe that his band The Hellp have been the blueprint for “at least four” successful electronic artists in New York, and how “this project isn’t about hedonism, it’s about legacy, and we have a legacy, and I refuse to let anyone take that away.” And how he resents that he has to even say it. 

The Hellp – vocalist Dillon and his bandmate Chandler Ransom Lucy, both of whom produce – are coming off some of the most successful months of their career, including two sold-out dates earlier in the week at London’s Outernet, their biggest headline shows ever. The current European tour they’re on in support of their new album Riviera – their second for major label Atlantic Records – marks a watershed moment in the band’s decade-long career, a raucous affair that comes on the heels of a run of shows supporting 2hollis in October 2025 and Riviera’s hyped November release. 

Still, Dillon doesn’t seem particularly enthused by his current moment. He lets out a sigh and slumps his shoulders. “Interviews always become about this sort of thing,” he says. His navy peacoat is sagging away from his chest; along with his hangdog expression, it’s making him look even more like a Dickensian orphan than when he limped into the lobby of the Aethos Shoreditch thirty minutes earlier – a lingering relic of the construction work he did as a child growing up in Colorado. “Can anybody ask about what we think about, like, why Range Rovers look like that now?” he asks, with full seriousness. I tell him I only asked about what he meant when he said The Hellp created the “framework” for contemporary underground music. His bandmate Lucy chimes in: “Maybe we’re the problem.” 

The Hellp are a ridiculous band and they make great music. They cannot help their ridiculousness, and this unique combination of insane hubris and battered-puppy self-flagellation, as evidenced above, is likely what led to the fantastic Riviera. It pulls together elements of heartland rock, electroclash, 3OH!3 and anthemic late-aughts indie and kneads them into something grandiose and drenched in pathos; Arcade Fire for a generation whose brains were 50% microplastic before they were even born.

Riviera is anthemic and populist, but devised by a slightly boffin-like figure in Dillon, who talks about “the ontology of The Hellp” and “striations of fans” and frequently undersells his band’s success as the annoying byproduct of his quest to be a capital-I Important band. I ask about the reception to Riviera, and he thinks for a moment. “‘Proud’ is not the right word. ‘It’s good’ is also not the right descriptor. It did what it needed to do, and that’s important to me,” says Dillon. The Hellp’s sophomore album LL, he explains, was well-received, but lumped into a broader “indie sleaze” revival that he and Lucy don’t identify with; that miscategorisation, in turn, led to ridicule. “[It was like,] ‘These guys are pushing 90 and they’re a joke,’” he says. (The Hellp don’t divulge their ages in interviews, but a mutual friend estimates that Lucy is 29 and Dillon is 32.)

“A lot of the songs [on LL] were juvenile by design and by nature, but some of them weren’t, but it doesn’t matter,” Dillon says. “The general feeling of that record was like, bangers, bangers, bangers. [Riviera] needed to have slightly better lyricism and songwriting. It needed to be darker. Most importantly, it needed to be an authentic reflection of what we think this band is.” 

*** 

“I just hold things in high reverence, and if I’m making music, it has to be good” – Noah Dillon

The Hellp was formed in 2015 by Dillon and his friend Eddie Liaboh, but its current iteration began around 2016, after Lucy was cast in a shoot Dillon was working on with Luka Sabbat. (In addition to being in The Hellp, Dillon is an in-demand fashion and music photographer, and shot Rosalia’s Lux album artwork, although he seems sad about this too, because “you can’t be the renaissance man.”) 

“We hated each other for the first four hours we were in the same room together. But we stayed up all night, went to the desert, shot some things there, and then we bonded over an A$AP Rocky song in the car, screaming the lyrics,” Dillon recalls. (It was “Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye 2”.) Dillon told Lucy to get some drumsticks, but didn’t reveal why, “Because I was very ashamed. I just hold things in high reverence, and if I’m making music, it has to be good.” 

Over the next few years, The Hellp played shows in LA and New York, made a bunch of music that Dillon says “wasn’t good,” and built up connections with other artists and musicians. Their 2021 EP Enemy was a creative breakthrough; Dillon and Lucy say it’s the purest expression of the band, and captures the feeling they were trying to achieve with Riviera. In 2023, the band signed with Atlantic Records – the major label that has Bruno Mars, Charli XCX and Cardi B on its roster – and released LL, their first proper album. 

In interviews, Dillon has spoken about wanting The Hellp to be considered in the same vein as more highbrow acts like Smerz or Dean Blunt – arty musicians making pop music that’s less direct, more subliminal. Why, then, sign to Atlantic? “When I started the band, I wanted to be in the DNA of those artists – I wanted to be seen as a band with more intellectual rigor,” he says, a grin creeping across his face. “But it kind of backfired because of one reason, and the reason is that I sort of betrayed myself for the prospect of fame.” 

“If the knockout girl from the end of the bar comes over to you and is like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ you have to talk to her, you can’t just say no. We never thought a major label would come knocking ever, and they did,” Dillon says. “We could have taken two routes: One was let the band be this underground thing where if you knew you really knew, or we could take it to the next level and experiment with the hilarious nature of The Hellp being on Atlantic Records and making two songs about American states – “California Dream Girl” and “Colorado”. 

He continues: “That’s crazy, so why not take that leap for a minute and do the thing? But yeah, I kind of betrayed a lot of who I am and what we could have been, so that people can take photos with us on the street.” 

“Right now, Noah and I’s worst days are a lot of people’s dreams” – Chandler Lucy

Lucy says that “right now, Noah and I’s worst days are a lot of people’s dreams.” “If you have a chance to have your music be listened to by 600,000 people a month on Spotify, or whatever the number is, if you’re granted that opportunity and you don’t pursue that, you should go to hell,” he says. “You know how many people I went to school with that are fucking musicians who play guitar and stuff, who fucking hate me because I’m an idiot and I’m on a major label? I gotta do it to fucking let them know who the real dog is. It’s not that egotistical, but sometimes you’re getting opportunities in life, and you need to say yes to them.” 

*** 

Nobody talks like this. It is fun, and refreshing, that The Hellp do. As I see it, their motivation for saying outlandish and crazy things and taking a laissez-faire, fuck-it-I’m-a-rock-star attitude is the fact that they grew up in the era of music blogs like Hipster Runoff, when indie stars were crazy and antagonistic and had a lot more fun than anyone seems to have now. Lucy grew up “dirt poor” (Dillon’s words) in California; his parents met at a punk show, and he says he’s putting somewhat unlikely influences, like the Jersey punk band The Front Bottoms, in The Hellp’s music. Dillon grew up loving music and thinking that “Pitchfork is God,” and started The Hellp because he knew that he would one day regret it if he wasn’t in a cool band at some point in his life. There is an earnestness inherent to the band, which is why they hate when people go online and call them posers. 

“I’m like, well, where exactly are we the posers? I’m serious. 2,000-person sold out show, multiple venues across Europe. [People say] ‘They’re not musicians’, but I guess we technically are,” says Lucy. “We are on Atlantic Records. We have been wearing leather jackets for years. We have beautiful girlfriends, so where are we the posers?” 

Dillon adds: “People are shit-testing us, rightly so, because that’s what you do. You fire the kiln hotter and hotter and hotter, and the pot becomes harder and harder, and if it cracks, then it was faulty,” he says. “If it doesn’t, then it becomes the beautiful object it can be.” 

The fans in the room matter more to Dillon and Lucy than the kids on TikTok asking them to grow up or change. The classic rock gilding of Riviera speaks to how they want those fans to feel at the shows. “I’m certain that a lot of our fans, when they’re 50 years old, they’ll be able to listen to some of our songs and be like ‘Fuck, that was a good record, man,’” Lucy says. “A lot of other stuff, I don’t think people will be enjoying that when they’re 60. Our fans are identifying with something that’s a lot more mature and timeless. 

“We’re still not a phenomenon – we have cool status, but we’re not like, [the most hyped thing,]” he says. “It’s just: We believe in this. We believe in these people. We believe what we represent.”

Hair: Hikaru Hirano at Frank Reps. Set design: Ava Villafañe at Streeters. Photographic assistant: Alexander Coopersmith. Styling assistants: Charlie Edwards, Karen Gonzales, Ryan Phung and Sam Thapa. Set design assistants: Kabir Mogaji and Noah Heie. Executive production: Wes Olson at Connect The Dots. Production: Anna Blundell at Connect The Dots. Production assistants: Cameron Hoge, Fiona Tagliente and Khari Cousins

This story is taken from the Summer/Autumn 2026 issue of Another Man, Volume II, Issue V, which is on sale internationally from 30 April 2026.