DANGEROUS DREAMER

Seven years after his last English-language release, Mika returns with new album, Hyperlove. Here, the "created by the UK" artist reveals the method behind his melodies

- NICK LEVINE

Mika’s schedule is so packed that it takes him a second to remember where he is.

“Fuck knows!” he says with a smile, speaking over Zoom from a smart-looking but hardly geo-specific hotel room. “No, I'm in Madrid!” he adds as the penny drops. “I flew in from London yesterday to do radio interviews and film a TV show.” That TV show is La Voz, the Spanish version of The Voice, which Mika has recently joined as a coach. Later, he’ll play a live show with a 2.30am curtain call - “only in Spain!” he says with an eye roll - before waking up early to fly to Montreal.

By any rights, Mika should seem a bit manic, but actually he’s fun, friendly and unflappable. He’s heading to Montreal so he can “film visuals on one of the biggest green-screen stages in North America”. It’s a state-of-the-art space that musicians are normally “locked out of”, he says, “because video budgets have disappeared”. However, Mika prides himself on “really fucking fighting” to make sure his content looks like the “high-production poetry” he sees in his head. “If you’re not a gargantuan artist selling out seven nights at The O2, you’re told to ‘make do’, but I reject that,” he says.

The world tries to tell us it’s a condition that needs to be suppressed, but that is bullshit.” Mika describes himself as a “dangerous dreamer” and his vivid imagination really shines through on his excellent new album, Hyperlove. Set for release on 23 January, it’s his first English-language album since 2019's My Name Is Michael Holbrook and a welcome reminder of his gift for making “alternative experimental pop” (his words) with utterly transcendent melodies (ours). The shimmering album closer ‘Immortal Love’ is a new Mika midtempo classic to file alongside 2006's ‘Relax, Take It Easy’ and 2009’s ‘Rain’.

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