Photo courtesy of Anticon Records

The third track on Alias‘s new album Fever Dream, “Revl Is Divad,” is hip-hop in nature but draws heavily from the trance tradition. Like the title hints, the stuttering vocals swirl around one’s head like a fever induced hallucination, while the surrounding warm melodies comfort your ears like a blanket. As Alias tells Hive, a few different things have seeped into his ideas of constructing music since his last album, 2008′s Resurgam. Namely, Los Angeles beat scene work, Yeasayer‘s latest album, The Odd Blood and the idea of falling asleep with the television on.

“I have a vivid memory from my childhood when I was really sick,” Alias says. “I was lying in bed, going in and out of consciousness with the TV on. What was on the TV was starting to overlap with what I was dreaming and it created this really unsettling feeling that was super trippy. I wanted to harness that weirdness and try to incorporate it into the beats.”

For “Revl Is Divad,” there was a specific concentration on morphing from an R&B slow jam to a cluster of tempo shifts at around the 2:00 minute mark, along with a host of layered vocals. “I just wanted people to get into the groove of the first half and then completely flip it on it’s head. Or as Brian Austin Green would say, ‘swiggity switch it up.’”

Alias’ new album Fever Dream is out August 30 via Anticon.