Premiere: Opin Thrill & Mesmerize With Latest Improvisational Mixtape, Hospital Street III
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” ― Aldous Huxley
For nearly a decade, Richmond electronic trio Opin has embodied this sentiment, crafting concise songs, long-form jams, and abstract expressions that reflect a persistent devotion to sonic exploration. Their music has served as a vessel for giving shape to intangible emotions–fleeting and complex, often contradictory, yet always vividly rendered within the nuanced textures of their sound. Since releasing their full-length album Media & Memory in 2020 via WarHen Records, Opin has embraced a more fluid, experimental approach to their output. Through abstract mixtapes, one-off singles, and a collaborative remix record, the band has charted a capricious course that signals the creative leaps and sonic advancements they’ve made together in their recording journey, one that is now steering toward a much-anticipated album release.
But before that next chapter begins, Opin offers another fascinating detour: Hospital Street III, the latest entry in their improvisational mixtape series. Combining loose ends from their practice space and recording studios, the project combines wayward loops, compulsive grooves, and darting sounds in order to capture the full expanse of electronic music. At once anxious and joyful, pensive and urgent, Hospital Street III is a sonic collage that captures the beautiful impermanence of mood and moment, a space that Opin has not just reveled in since their formation, but have mastered. Set for release on Friday, April 18, this new thirty-minute collection showcases the raw pull of their sound: deliberate yet wild, pensive yet intense. Today, The Auricular is proud to premiere the mixtape with an exclusive stream below, alongside a deeper exploration of this current stop on Opin’s creative journey… and a glimpse of the next milestone just beyond the horizon.
The Hospital Street series began in 2021, with the first installment later reissued in 2022 by WarHen Records on a limited run of cassette tapes. That initial release was recorded and produced alongside much of the material that would eventually shape the band’s forthcoming album, an effort recently teased through the singles “Exit Check” and “Bodywork.” Originally, the band had discussed Valley Bombastic as the album’s title, previously mentioned in two recent interviews with Style Weekly, but as the final touches come, into place, a new name has emerged: Embrace The Grift, a phrase lifted from a lyric in one of the album’s planned tracks (“embrace the grift of a good time”).
The spirit of that lyric seeps into its unofficial predecessor, Hospital Street III, a mixtape that continues the improvisational lineage of its earlier volumes with unrestrained sonic revelry. It begins with a pulsing rhythmic groove, as the band opens its soundscape with a sense of spacious freedom–inviting and gracious–as layers accumulate and the scope expands. Soon, a more traditional electronic pulse emerges, mysterious and nervy, delivered with a primal urgency over a beat that mimics a racing heart.
A sudden wall of noise marks the transition into a new section, where experimental tinkering takes over–modulating pitch and rhythm until the sound coheres into something strangely intentional. From this chaos, a thumping house track rises, prowling with purpose and scanning for the next space to stretch its restless groove. This portion of the mixtape showcases the most shape-shifting moments yet, with moments that start in familiar territory before quickly morphing into nebulous, hazy, but equally electrifying forms. It’s a testament to Opin’s protean sensibilities: always evolving, forever in motion.
An ambient sense of wonder then slips in, an energy that has long haunted the edges of Opin’s music, lending an ethereal curiosity to everything they create. A shoegaze-inflected march follows, filled with diverse percussive textures that ground the misty atmosphere in something communal as if the haze echoes outward across a vast shared space occupied by a winding melody threading the sonic fog with quiet intimacy.
The mixtape winds down with a near-droning ambient interlude, clearing the path for its final statement: a jazzy digital saunter that embodies Opin’s guiding principle. Groove and rhythm are the compass. Here, all sounds are welcome, but they remain firmly tethered to the band’s steady, deliberate direction that follows their own internal pace through all of its fluctuations.
More than any of the band’s recent singles, Hospital Street III offers the clearest glimpse yet of what’s to come on Embrace The Grift, due out later this spring on streaming platforms and vinyl via Blank Verse Records. It’s a record built to electrify any club space–irresistibly drawing in anyone within earshot–but just as capable of slipping into moments of solitary introspection, carving out space for listeners to locate their own emotions, letting them rise, settle, and take shape. As Opin nears a decade in recording existence, these qualities show that the well the trio draws from will always be plentiful and full of surprises. That fact leaves us to savor Hospital Street III while already wondering not just about the next record, but what might unfold in the fourth, fifth, or even sixth installment still to come.
Hospital Street III is set for release on streaming platforms on Friday, April 18. To stay up-to-date on the roll-out of the band’s next record, Embrace The Grift, make sure to follow the band on social media.
