Maribou State on Beating a Serious Brain Injury and New Album ‘Hallucinating Love’

As Billboard speaks to British dance duo Maribou State, who are readying to release their third album Hallucinating Love, an epiphany strikes the pair. Liam Ivory reminds his longtime friend and bandmate Chris Davids, that we’re speaking on the year anniversary of the day that Davids had life-changing brain surgery. 

In late 2021, Davids began suffering from debilitating headaches and was often struck down with crippling pain. He was eventually diagnosed with a chiari malformation which, he explains, is when the lower part of the brain herniates into the spinal canal putting pressure on the brainstem and spinal fluid. The American Association of Neurological Surgeons estimate it impacts less than 1 in 1000 people. It is an injury that is perhaps not well suited for someone who needs to be locked to the intricacy of music production, or peering into a laptop screen trying to piece the whole song together.

“It had a profound effect on the music,” Davids tells Billboard of the LP, which was written and recorded as they worked their way through multiple challenges on the personal front. “A lot of the music was shaped around the theme of struggle, and creating to remove yourself from a difficult period and projecting into something that’s brighter and more hopeful.”

Hallucinating Love arrives after a particularly torrid period since their last LP, 2018’s Kingdoms in Colour. That record, which included a collaboration with Khruangbin, landed at No.25 on the U.K. Official Albums Charts and its songs collectively boast over 271 million streams on Spotify. The tour ended with a sold-out show at London’s O2 Academy Brixton (5,000 capacity) and saw growing headline gigs in North America and mainland Europe. 

The pair got their start in 2011 releasing their Habitat EP on Fat Cat Records, and would later release singles and EPs on Fatboy Slim’s Southern Fried label. They later signed to beloved London-based dance label Ninja Tune, home to releases by Bonobo, Barry Can’t Swim and Peggy Gou, and released their debut album Portraits in 2015, which stars “Midas,” a single was certified Silver by the BPI and sits at 152 million streams on Spotify. Elsewhere they’ve remixed records by Lana Del Rey and Radiohead during their decade-long career.

When Maribou State’s last tour concluded in late 2019 and the world went into lockdown soon after, the problems began. The pair had lived a high-octane life on the road, hopping from city to city, partying, neglecting themselves but putting on bigger and better shows. The confines of being at home impacted their wellbeing and pulled into focus mental health challenges that had been pushed to one side. Davids was battling insomnia and was coming to terms with an ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), while Ivory was living with increased anxiety.

Even so, their star grew on social media and streaming despite a period of inactivity; next year, they’ll headline three shows at London’s 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace, and take in prestigious North American venues including New York City’s Terminal 5 and Toronto’s History. 

Hallucinating Love (released Jan. 31, 2025) has emerged as their most thematic and sonically cohesive record to date. Their sound, which fuses psych-rock, funk, retro-soul and banging beats, is warmer, looser and more attention-grabbing than anything before. “Other Side” with key collaborator Walker is as direct a pop moment they’ve ever had, while “Peace Talk” has the feel of an undiscovered cult classic, such is the majesty of the swelling string refrain.

As they release their new single “Dance On The World,” the pair tell us about their difficult period, the pressure of being on the road and staying loyal to their collaborators.

It’s been a six-year gap between the release of your last two studio albums. When you finished touring Kingdoms In Colour, were you anticipating a break like this?

Liam: It took us by surprise. Historically we have taken quite a while to write albums compared to other artists, but through a number of things happening in the world and in our lives personally it just took a hell of a lot longer than we anticipated. There were times where it felt like it was never going to happen.

A lot has happened between lockdown, medical issues and focusing on your mental health. How do you look back on the experience in totality?

Chris: With mixed feelings to be honest. It was a really important process for us to go through, personally and creatively. We learned a lot about ourselves in that time. We’re grateful that we were in a position where we were able to press pause for a minute during the writing process, and to look after ourselves and not just push through and break ourselves when doing it. 

Liam: We’re also lucky to be able to say that things are in a good place for us now. It’s easier to look back with rose-tinted glasses on as we managed to find a way through that period which we might not be able to do if we were still struggling. It’s nice to be able to box that off.

The adjustment from being on the road to being back home was clearly difficult…

Liam: When we were touring we weren’t looking after ourselves very well and we were partying quite a lot. So transitioning back to normal life either way would have been difficult, but we landed right at the start of the pandemic. We went from touring on a super high-octane lifestyle to being shut at home. 

We were quite separate at that point, too. I’d just moved in with my partner and friend; Chris was back home with his family. We came back together when things eased up and started working together and then it became a very supporting relationship.

Chris, can you share more details on what you’ve had to go through?

Chris: In 2021, I started getting these chronic debilitating headaches. We were staying over at the studio one time, and I remember I woke up one morning and when I stood up I was bent over in pain. I got an MRI scan and a few months later I got diagnosed with a chiari malformation.

That was a shock. We’d been going really hard to make this record but we were both not really in the right place to be doing that. We weren’t feeling super creative and we were doing it for the sake of doing it rather than because we wanted to. Getting that diagnosis gave me a reason to take a break, so we both had a good few months out at that point.

I was trying to plough through and I’m someone who doesn’t like to admit defeat. In reality, it’s something I should have just got sorted and then came back. But it’s hard to push aside something that you love doing.

Liam, It must have been hard to see your friend go through that?

Liam: Yeah, the thing with Chris is that he’s so bloody stoic so he would just push on. We’d be in sessions and then he’d keel over in pain and just say ‘give me a minute’ and then shrug it off. I didn’t know what to do as it didn’t feel like we should be carrying on… but he was up for it and there was a deadline looming. Some additional insight into how little Chris will admit defeat: when he was in hospital, he was commenting on the artwork, replying to emails like a week or two after surgery. Just crazy.

How did this period inform the music you ended up writing for Hallucinating Love?

Liam: When we write we usually hire an Air BnB, take our studio and some collaborators and hash it out until we have the ideas. Those trips are peppered throughout the period that we recorded the album in. Looking back, one or two of those trips were really difficult; none of us were in a good headspace at all, really low mental health, really struggling. Ironically the songs that came from those sessions are some of the most hopeful and uplifting, but they’re really specific to a moment and you can put yourself back into that time.

You’ve mentioned that “Blackoak” is a bit of a love letter to the British dance scene. How did that manifest itself?

Chris: Over the years mine and Liam’s tastes have been very broad. We were into lots of different things and Liam was into loads of hardcore, metal and punk, but the one thing we always aligned on was dance music and artists like Prodigy, Aphex Twin and some British scenes like happy hardcore. We went to [Warwickshire dance festival] Global Gathering, to [London club] Fabric and then also saw Daft Punk live together. Over the years we’ve made club-influenced music but influenced by more contemporary stuff like future garage, but “Blackoak” felt like more of a homage to what we listened to growing up.”

There’s also familiar collaborators like Holly Walker, but new names too with Andreya Triana. It must be nice to have developed a consistent community around yourself?

Liam: We’re not ones for setting up random sessions with people and seeing how it goes. We need to have a relationship with them first. The way we write music is quite a long arduous process for us, and you need to be around people you really connect with.

Chris: The whole connection thing is so important. Because we’ve tried lots of sessions with other vocalists and nine times out of 10, it doesn’t work. We had a collaboration with Khruangbin on the last album and I’m so glad we got it to work in the end, but it was lots of sessions we had to do over a long period of time. Like Liam said, there’s something to feeling comfortable and once we’ve established a friendship, things can be so much more fluid.

Holly takes the lead on a number of tracks, and you’ve worked together on several songs now. What is that bond like?

Chris: We just clicked with Holly. She’s incredibly funny, really intelligent and an amazing lyricist. We wrote a couple of songs that got put on the first record, and we struck up a good writing relationship from there. And it’s definitely not been a totally easy relationship over the years, there’s been a lot of push and pull and quite strong creative forces on both sides, but I think that’s what has created such great music between us.

You mentioned touring taking its toll last time. How are you feeling about getting back out on the road?

Liam: One thing we navigate is being several years older and being in very different places in our lives and trying to protect a quality of life. Although we’ve not been out touring yet, there’s a lot of conversations about what it’s going to be like and how we’re going to get through it. It’s going to be a very different affair to when we were out last time in 2019.

And you want to create as great a show as you can, right?

Chris: There’s such high expectations of what a show should look like in terms of production and everything that’s put on both on stage and behind the scenes. Not just musically. It’s also more of a challenge to create content because labels want so much more from the gigs, so there is that pressure that touring costs a lot more but also you need to spend a lot more to meet the standard. You can’t just do an Oasis and go out and stare at your shoes and a couple of lights in the background.

Liam: We’re also so fortunate that the fanbase feels more tangible than it ever has. We’ve been lucky that over the years, even when we’ve taken a break, it’s just grown and gone from strength to strength in parallel while we were struggling personally. It’s made us even more committed.