HIGH HI

We really must have a word about HIGH HI. After all, since reaching the final of the Rock Rally (2014), they’ve had a few rather unusual Wikipedia entries that might one day take centre stage in a show by Jan Delvaux and Jimmy Dewit. Take, for example, an album that got somewhat lost amidst the constant back-and-forth between Sophie Wilmès and Sciensano – that infamous Covid year of 2020, in other words. And do you remember their famous Rock Werchter stunt?  They were on stage there for six minutes.  For Napalm Death, that’s enough to play their global hit ‘You Suffer’ 36,000 times; we can imagine, however, that whilst that show – cut short by bad luck – makes for a good story to tell the grandchildren, it remains a consolation prize. Anyway, the Covid album turned out to be a success after all thanks to the single ‘Daggers’, which clawed its way to the top of the Afrekening chart, whilst the six-minute show was more than made up for thanks to Chokri, on whose Pukkelpop stage High Hi triumphed in 2025 in a way that defies description. Another year has passed and the LP ‘Noonday Demon’ (2026) delivers exactly what we’d hoped for: giving all those high expectations a high five, one by one.  We’ll talk about the cover art another time, because what we see is the result of a dog mating with a Gremlin, but that might just be us.  Gremlins is a film from the 80s, and we suspect that music from that decade and the ten years before it is played more often than not through the speakers in the High Hi rehearsal room. Without falling into the nostalgia trap, mind you. “Noonday Demon” is versatile, bursting with brilliant ideas and equally brilliant melodies – a headphone LP – and contains nothing but single material. When we hear a song like ‘Scammers’ a few times in a row, we suddenly end up with rubbery legs from the uninhibited dancing. Incidentally, we old-timers at the Lokerse Feesten do like a statistic or two, so we asked some AI tool what percentage of a packed venue dances enthusiastically during a High Hi concert.  We hadn’t expected it, but blimey, we actually got an answer. A whopping 89.9 per cent of the people who bought a ticket, the bar staff and the security team are dancing their hearts out after fifteen minutes of High Hi. You’re dancing, the person next to you is dancing, the bloke diagonally behind you in the Napalm Death T-shirt is dancing, the toilet attendant is dancing. Everyone’s dancing, even the letter T in the conjugation of the verb ‘to dance’ is dancing to the cheerful tunes of this utterly unique band. Come and join us on Wednesday 5 August.