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The Hellp at Coachella: slowing the BPM, blazing the trail, staying dangerously unfiltered
From “random beat” to personal classic: the anatomy of caustic
“Had a really bad beat—made it a really good beat.” That’s Noah Dillon’s blunt recap of how The Hellp’s single caustic came alive. The original loop sat at a blistering 180 BPM. Once Chandler and Noah Dillon started collaborating in earnest, they dragged it down to 140, mangled it with distortion, and layered in the polyrhythmic funk-drum claps Noah was obsessed with at the time.
The last push came from their associate Liam (“ATL Grandma Liam” to the Atlanta heads), who heard a SoundCloud track that chopped the vocal in half-phrases. He applied the trick to caustic’s chorus—Noah’s line “You know you’re addicted to…” firing back and forth in two voices—and the duo knew they’d cracked something. “Does it stream like a hit? Maybe not,” Noah shrugs, “but it’s a hit to us.”
Authenticity as second nature—no PR polish required
Call it confidence or call it chaos, but The Hellp refuse to sand the edges off their persona. “We’re not on the PR-train wave,” Noah says.
“We’re just kind of being ourselves… and that might make people uncomfortable.”
For Chandler, authenticity isn’t a brand strategy—it’s whatever survives revision after a burst of stream-of-consciousness writing:
“You go back later, maybe revise if you got out of pocket, but hopefully by the time you’re done it stays true to who you are. If not, you try again.”
That raw approach draws fiercely committed fans—and predictable online haters. “We’re 100 percent us, 100 percent of the time,” Chandler says. “Some people just don’t accept that.”
“We broke the trail in the snow”: staking their claim at the forefront
The pair don’t shy away from calling themselves pioneers of their corner of the alt-electronic underground. Noah puts it bluntly:
“We did most of the groundwork to allow this type of culture to happen.”
Noah then adds that when they started there was “no community—not even one contact to mix the first record.”
They frame newer acts less as rivals and more as travelers following freshly cut tracks: “We broke the trail in the snow and other people can kind of go behind us.” What separates The Hellp, in their eyes, is motive. “We care about art, we care about pushing the needle forward of culture… a lot of other people see it online and go, ‘I want to be cool.’” Whether that sounds cocky or inspirational is up to the listener, but the duo stand by it—and by the responsibility that comes with leading a scene they helped birth.
Blue-collar roots and the need to prove it—first to themselves
Both grew up in small industrial towns, pouring concrete and clocking construction shifts. Back then, music felt like a lone escape route: “Everybody hated me… this was such a foreign world,” Noah admits. Early on the mission was classic chip-on-shoulder stuff—show the hometown doubters they were wrong. Now, a decade in, the target has shifted inward: “I’m more interested in showing ourselves we can do it than showing other people,” Noah says.
That mindset fuels their claim that they “broke the trail in the snow” for the current scene—a sound they insist they pushed forward while “there was no community, not even one contact to mix the first record.”
Visuals: whatever keeps the crash at bay
If the music is instinctual, the wardrobe is survival. “Whatever can keep me from crashing the fuck out every day, I’m gonna try to do,” Noah deadpans. There’s no grand Bowie-esque alter-ego—just boots, leather, and silhouettes they think look cool enough to stay afloat. Chandler’s a touch more deliberate, but the rule of thumb is the same: wear what feels right, move on.
Inspiration in paradox and Bay-Area gangster rap
Legends loom in the background—“we’re all children of their work,” Noah concedes—but direct influence is thin. What other artists mainly do is spark competitiveness: “It inspires me to work harder, not borrow their aesthetic.”
One recent exception: Woody, a ’90s Antioch gangster-rapper who ran his own label, made his own beats, and documented real street life. Chandler rediscovered him and now spins his catalog daily for the sheer “soul” it transmits.
Paradox, they argue, is built into the process.
“If you’re not contradicting yourself every second, you’re not a great man,”
Noah says, citing the old maxim about greatness and paradox. Translation: everything they’ve said here could flip tomorrow—and that’s fine.
What’s next: Do LaB, new singles, European laps, an EP
Immediately after our chat, The Hellp are DJ-ing the Do LaB stage—one more Coachella flex before the desert dust settles. A fresh single lands “in a couple days,” followed by a few more, then it’s back “in the lab” to chase the next sound. European festivals are penciled in and bigger headline shows are on the horizon.
Whatever the itinerary, the duo seem almost surprised—and genuinely grateful—to be here at all:
“At best I thought we’d be playing basement shows in New York… but we’re here, among the legends at the greatest festival in the world.”
Trailblazers, paradox merchants, survivalists —however you slice it, The Hellp are still forging their own crooked line, BPM shift by BPM shift, until the next unfiltered chapter drops.
