A Fever Dream at 9,700 Feet: Hippo Campus Cracks the Sky at Copper Mountain

By Ali DeLambo

Image courtesy of Billboard

Hippo Campus—Jake Luppen (vocals, guitar), Nathan Stocker (guitar, vocals), Zach Sutton (bass), Whistler Allen (drums), and DeCarlo Jackson (trumpet, percussion)—is the kind of band that doesn’t just walk on stage, they detonate it. At Copper Mountain, in front of a sunburnt, wind-whipped crowd of skiers, festival kids, and weekend wanderers, they showed up like an avalanche: loud, wild, and impossible to look away from. This was no ticketed arena show, no curated festival set in a fenced-off field. This was a free, open-air, mountain-top moment that felt both completely accidental and cosmically aligned. These kinds of shows don’t happen often—not with a band like this, one just big enough to feel like a miracle in a place like this. And somehow, it all still felt intimate. Electric. Holy.

They opened with “Madman” and barely gave us time to blink before slamming into “Paranoid” and “Bambi.” The set moved like weather—sudden, shifting, alive. Luppen’s voice was a live wire, veering between falsetto trembles and full-throated howls, while Stocker stalked the stage like he was chasing something just out of reach. Jackson, as always, was the secret weapon, slipping between trumpet lines and off-kilter rhythms like a trickster god.

I watched the entire show standing on a block of icy snow, left over from the slopes just feet from the stage—an accidental pedestal, cold seeping up through the soles of my boots while the band burned through “Bad Dream Baby” and “Tooth Fairy.” The absurdity of it hit me in waves: my breath visible in the night air, my fingertips going numb, the bass rattling my ribs. And yet, it felt right—like this exact set could never happen anywhere else, to anyone else, at any other time.

The setlist didn’t play it safe. “South” unfurled like a memory you didn’t want to let go of. “Corduroy” and “Where to Now” bled into each other, beautiful and aching. By the time they hit “Everything At Once” and “Baseball,” it wasn’t even a concert anymore—it was a fever dream you didn’t want to wake up from. Strangers were singing into each other’s shoulders, jumping in place just to stay warm, cheeks chapped and grinning like feral kids at summer camp.

Then came “Sex Tape,” and with it, a moment of hilarious self-awareness. Luppen paused mid-song, laughing, “I’m trying to cuss less,” he said, clearly clocking the mix of little kids, ski dads, stoned college students, and the occasional dog in the crowd. It cracked the crowd wide open—suddenly, we weren’t just watching the band onstage, we were with the group. A band this dialed-in, this precise, still finding space to be weird, human, and wildly funny.

They closed with “Boys,” and it felt like everyone in the crowd was singing at full volume—strangers harmonizing like they’d known each other for years, steam rising from our bodies like smoke. Hippo Campus didn’t just play Copper Mountain. They cracked it open and filled it with something tender and electric—something that felt impossibly personal for a show this size. And somehow, standing there on a slab of snow under the open sky, it felt just like it did when I first met them in 2018, before a much smaller show. The same warmth. The same weird, magnetic ease. The same sense that this band isn’t just

performing at you—they’re inviting you in, letting you live inside the songs for a while. All these years and miles later, the vibe hadn’t changed. If anything, it had only deepened.