Heavenly Blue “We Have The Answer”

LP - $17.25
LP UPC:791689666112
STREET DATE: 4/12/24
CAT#: SV26
LABEL: Secret Voice

Heavenly Blue are unwavering in their deep punk roots. The artists responsible for crafting a sound now over 25 years old are not only reemerging, but sharing the stage with influenced younger musicians who thought they would never get the opportunity. Heavenly Blue's maximalist approach shows through their 7 member ensemble's composition, their emotional sound and communal style of songwriting across miles and various locations captures the spirit that bands from their era and those past are championed on a philosophical level. In other words, Heavenly Blue are a modern update to an overlooked form, and the title of their debut LP, We Have The Answer, is an apt and promising description of the period in which the sound now finds itself.

The Detroit, MI based septet consists of vocalists Juno Parsons and Mel Caren, guitarists Kris Lane, Maya Chun, and Mac Porter, and a rhythm section consisting of bassist Jon Riley and drummer Andrew Coughlin. From the end of Chun's and Riley's previous band Youth Novel, the pair enlisted a number of Michigan musicians of varying levels of experience, exchanging demos with each other over the course of a year. From there, Heavenly Blue toured with bands like Frail Body, Venus Twins, Blind Girls, and Touché Amoré. Through their connection to Touché Amoré's vocalist Jeremy Bolm, the band produced their first track, "Certain Distance," for a compilation on Bolm's imprint Secret Voice Records. On Heavenly Blue's collaborative spirit and how it has led them to this point, Riley asserts,

"The title invokes an unquestionable certainty, yet without thinking about exactly who or what "we" is, you may miss the point. The process of making this record involved a deeply collaborative process where every single member of the group put their whole selves into the music. The result is a statement I feel is deeply personal of what I want out of a record. Something loud and blistering, but hopefully still visceral."

Heavenly Blue's style is earmarked by screamo's familiar dynamics of harmony and dissonance played both to complement and work against each other. For them, it's about bringing screamo sensibilities to noise rock and post-hardcore. On We Have The Answer, they explore the traditional pairing of heavy/ugly and soft/pretty, but additionally approaches the concept's inverse, playing melodies violently and fast complex passages softly. Heavenly Blue also mixes in hardcore influence with mid-song breakdowns as verses.

We Have The Answer continually begs the same emotional analysis that aggressive music has demanded and rarely received for decades. Tracks like "We Have The Answer" and "Davos" carry the spirit of the band's past while other tracks, like "Heat Death Parade" and "Pando" sit in the realm of Heavenly Blue's noise rock contemporaries. Heavenly Blue demonstrates it can do a more traditional structure, with songs like album single "Static Voice Speaks To Static Me" and the pensive "…And Just Like That A Year Had Passed," while the unexpectedly danceable yet deeply melodic "A Part Of Me, A Part Of You" all offer refreshing takes on the chorus-verse mode of songwriting, while also challenging listeners to contemplate their repurposing of otherwise straightforward rhythms.

We Have The Answer's release through Jeremy Bolm's Secret Voice Records also highlights the intergenerational cooperation that has come to be one of the most exciting aspects of punk in the 2020's. In its own way, it highlights the statement that Heavenly Blue are making with the title of their work. The sense of community within the artists involved suggests a shared idea of purpose that is not common enough in music. If you have to ask what "the answer" is, Heavenly Blue insists upon listening and attending a show near you. Look for the answer within. Hopefully the seed is sown and you'll understand.

TRACK LISTING:

1. Davos
2. We Have The Answer
3. Pando
4. Glass So Clear
5. Certain Distance
6. Static Voice Speaks to Static Me
7. ...And Like That, A Year Had Passed
8. A Part Of Me, A Part Of You
9. Looming
10. Heat Death Parade
11. All Of The Piece Break

MARKETING POINTS:

• US tour with Frail Body in March
• Appeared on the Secret Voice comp "Balladeers, Redefined" in 2022

FOR FANS OF:
Saetia, Jemores Dream, Pageninetynine

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Soul Glo "Songs To Yeet At Then Sun"

12"EP - $17.25
12"EP UPC: 791689666204
STREET DATE: 4/5/24
CAT#: SV17
LABEL: Secret Voice

If you gave Soul Glo a snapshot of what was in store for them in 2020 at the end of their first practice in 2014, you might put the space time continuum in flux. If you were to tell vocalist Pierce Jordan and guitarist Ruben Polo that everything that they had spent their first month as a band joking about, playing shows with artists from punk vets Paint It Black to Kurt Cobain's favorites Flipper; from Memphis underground legend Tommy Wright III to platinum producer Pi'erre Bourne, were to actually happen, they might ask you if your hands were as fast as your jokes were. Despite the constant barrage of setbacks, from member changes, to financial strife, to run-ins with the law, Soul Glo has both repeatedly defied the kinds of odds that would fold lesser bands, not to mention their own standards for what they believed they could endure. Simultaneously, stopping or slowing down has never exactly been on the table for them, either.

"When we were stranded in Missouri, we started to weigh out the pros and cons of relocating there. We weren't just about to leave our mans," Jordan says. "Songs started getting crafted out there that we still have in the chamber."

That said, their next release, Songs To Yeet At The Sun, serves as a perfect respite from the silence in between LP's and the current lull in live performances that the band has become known for nationwide. The five song blessing gives a further insight into the frankly deranged production of bassist/producer Gianmarco Guerra, who served as the sole producer and one of three engineers for the record. Songs like "(Quietly) Do The Right Thing" and "29" continue to show Soul Glo's affinity for speed as a vehicle for their aggression and messages, while songs like "I'm On Probation" and the previously released "Mathed Up" shows the bands love of chaotic-yet-atmospheric noise and the most popular rhythmic vocal styles of today's current rap on top of the pummelling heaviness of the drums of TJ Stevenson. The band continues to showcase the rhythmic synergy existing between the entirety of the ensemble throughout the record, while the song "2K" features the straightforward rap production that peeked through on crowd-favorite songs "31" and "32" on the bands previous record The Nigga In Me Is Me, and also features a verse with instantly quotable lines from Richmond, VA artist Archangel.

All things considered, in a year where it feels as though quite literally anything could happen at any given moment, a record like the one that Soul Glo shorthandledly refers to as Yeet, one that features a violent and compelling sonic fusion that only they are capable of, is deeply necessary to times in which we currently find ourselves. In times where we are simply trying to survive from one minute to the next, one day to the next, it feels good in its own way, less lonely perhaps, to have music that reflects that uncertainty and fear.

TRACK LISTING:

1. (Quietly) Do The Right Thing
2. 29
3. 2k featuring Archangel
4. Mathed Up
5. I'm On Probation

MARKETING POINTS:

• One Sided 12"EP w/ Silk Screened B-Side
• Mixed and Mastered by Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Gouge Away)
• Touring History with Touché Amoré, Gouge Away, Jeromes Dream
• Secret Voice Label is owned and operated by Jeremy Bolm, vocalist of Touché Amoré and Hesitation Wounds

FOR FANS OF:
Denzel Curry, Jeromes Dream, Gulch

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Infant Island "Obsidian Wreath"

LP - $17.25 / CD - $8.75
LP UPC: 791689665900
CASSETTE UPC: 791689666198
STREET DATE: 1/12/24
CAT#: SV25
LABEL: Secret Voice

Fury in mourning. This is the emotional world in which Infant Island's third album, Obsidian Wreath, wraps itself and its listener. It is an album about trudging through the end of the world: where climate catastrophe, the acceleration of capitalist extractive exploitation, the apathy towards social health which has emerged from the pandemic, and an endless stream of ongoing crises too numerable to be named, constantly haunt the edges of our vision, like a rot that sets in on the borders of being. Obsidian Wreath is an album about the hopelessness of the slow violent decay of the world, about reckoning with a totalizing, impossible condition of reality which never stops confronting you with the question: how do we continue?

This is the question which Infant Island contends with throughout this record, a question they meet with fervor, with ferocity, with a determination and clarity marked -- sustained, even -- by grief. Lyrically, musically, the album shifts between light and darkness, using such tropes and their accompanying affects not in their cliché forms as opposing forces, but as mutually determined states of being which implicate and deterritorialize the Other. There must be something beautiful that can emerge from something terrible -- this kind of impossible hope, an optimism that only emerges only from the condition of absolute pessimism, guides the album's thematic considerations. Perhaps this impossible faith has something to do with Obsidian Wreath being a pandemic record -- written in 2020 but releasing in 2024, the record's slow birth reflects a force of will which was required to survive a global event which threatened the music industry and the people in it at every level.

This contradictory pessimistic optimism is realized as well in Infant Island's singular songwriting, which filters Virginia screamo through the melancholic furor of American Black Metal acts like Panopticon and Deafheaven. Obsidian Wreath continues and advances the band's masterful weaving of heavy genres, combining screamo and black metal with a deft movement between the sweeping emotionality of shoegazing post-metal, the hard-hitting grooviness of new-school grindcore, and the searing feedback of noise rock. Each composition flows seamlessly into the next, making this fluidity of sound feel not like an oscillation between styles, but instead like the tracing of the contours of a scene, as though Infant Island are tracing their own artistic singularity through the historicity and creative multiplicity of American extreme metal. One cannot shake the feeling that this is music born from a desire for community -- where we are accompanied through this world not only by our friends and family but by the ghosts, the historical presences we feel but remain forever out of sight, that we unwittingly follow every day. Produced again by Virginia legend Matthew Michel (Majority Rule, Nø Man); with guest spots from Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval (Greet Death) on "Kindling," Andrew Schwartz (.gif from god) on "Another Cycle"; and with contributions from members of Undeath, King Yosef, For Your Health, Senza, Malevich, Mikau, and more -- one can't help but feel that sense of community. Infant Island invites you into a scene, welcoming despite all its aesthetic harshness.

In this way, Obsidian Wreath is the kind of heavy music that would feel most proper to hear shuddering through the red clay bricks of rural Virginia, its place of birth. It is music that carries in its melodic intensity the materiality and contradictions of its Southern home, so geographically near, yet so culturally and economically far from the centers of American hegemonic power. The album art, from Virginian folk artist Sarah Bachman, captures this social rootedness, contrasting the ethereality of an Appalachian night with the chaotic obliterating power of a wildfire. Silhouetted figures, between ash and shadow, are imprinted on the ground, absently present, ghosts which cling to the land and to each other. Bachman's art expertly captures the political and emotional stakes of Infant Island's songwriting: a refusal to let go of this world.

Obsidian Wreath is the culmination of Infant Island's entire discography, synthesized into one LP and turned up to 11. As begun with 2020's Beneath and Sepulcher, four years later it continues the band's artistic direction to darker, harsher moods and sounds while also putting them in contrast with their most delicate and experimental Infant Island arrangements to date. It is a relentless, furious, and ever-shifting composition which coheres around expert composition and a single-minded interrogation of how we can possibly continue living in the state of this planet. In "Veil" at the midpoint of the record, all members of Infant Island, as well as many guests, chant together in unison to insist that "this world is enough." Standing in community, Infant Island insists not that the conditions of the world in which we live are adequate. No, they insist that this world contains within it already what is needed to transform it into something better and freer, something which will sustain the lives we cling to.

TRACK LISTING:

1. Another Cycle
2. Fulfilled
3. Found Hand
4. Clawing Still
5. Veil
6. Amaranthine
7. With Shadow
8. Unrelenting
9. Kindling
10. Vestigian

MARKETING POINTS:

• "Kindling" features Greet Death
• Mastered by Brad Boatright (Portrayal of Guilt, Gatecreeper, Obituary)
• Previous album "Beneath" received a 7.9 from Pitchfork
• Track featured on 2023's "Balladeers, Redefined" Compilation

FOR FANS OF:
Full Of Hell, Portrayal Of Guilt, Cult Leader, Frail Body

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Various Artists “Balladeers, Redefined”

2xLP - $19.40
2xLP UPC: 723314784274
STREET DATE: 7/14/23
CAT#: SV22
LABEL: Secret Voice

Word of mouth can be a powerful thing. Featuring new and unreleased tracks "Balladeers, Redefined" was originally going to be a small handful of bands but before long we found ourselves with 30+ who were all bringing their originality and brilliance to a genre held special by those who've found it. Every band recommended another band. The DIY network behind screamo and scream-adjacent indie or hardcore is like few others and that alone is a wonderful inspiration. This compilation brings together bands from all over, older and newer. From bands comprised of musicians who've been spearheading the sound like Jeromes Dream, Zeta, Gillian Carter, Hundreds of AU (members of You and I), NØ MAN (members of Majority Rule) and Terminal Bliss (members of Pg.99) to younger bands like Soul Glo, Record Setter, Infant Island, Boneflower, For Your Health, Slow Fire Pistol, Nuvolascura, Frail Body, Thirdface, Senza, Massa Nera, and many more.

TRACK LISTING:

1. Nuvolascura - Myriad
2. Hundreds of AU - New Arsenals
3. Record Setter - Outdated Wallpaper
4. Massa Nera - Fractures
5. Hawak - Newton
6. Thirdface - Trap Revealed
7. Closer - Lake Of Shells
8. Frail Body - Titus
9. NØ MAN - Can't Kill Us
10. Coma Regalia - FloorFourSeven
11. For Your Health - Twenty Dollar Enucleation (Love Is Blind)
12. Amitié - I Blame You
13. Elle - Whelm
14. Heavenly Blue - Certain Distance
15. Meth - Blind Animal
16. Soul Glo - Cum to Play
17. Jeromes Dream - Remainders to Parallel
18. Boneflower - Pyrrhic Victories
19. Gillian Carter - Bastard of Light
20. Lord Snow - In Between
21. Joliette - Pilates con Poncio
22. Carion Spring - Supervisionary
23. Zeta - Cascabel
24. Frail Hands - Reprieve
25. Slow Fire Pistol - Stolen
26. Crowning - Artifice
27. Senza - Due Glutton
28. Eyelet - Cinders
29. Terminal Bliss - Trapped In A Snow Globe
30. Hazing Over - 2022
31. Infant Island - Aurora

MARKETING POINTS:

• 31 tracks from screamo's most prolific and up and coming artists
• Featuring tracks from Soul Glo, Jeromes Dream, Frail Body, Record Setter & more!
• Released by Jeremy Bolm's (Touché Amoré, Hesitation Wounds) record label, Secret Voice
• Double LP includes a 32 page zine with lyrics and liner notes

Slow Fire Pistol "Radiant"

CASSETTE - $7.00
STREET DATE: 7/14/23
CAT#: SV24
LABEL: Secret Voice

Slow Fire Pistol is an Atlanta based band that was formed in 2016. Rooted in punk/hardcore, the band draws influence from a wide spectrum with an aim to create raw music that naturally combines power and melody. Since 2016, the band has released a demo, a split 7" and several EPs, now adding their newest release, "Radiant" to the catalog.

Quote: " "Radiant" is what we've always wanted this band to sound like. It's by far the most collaborative work we've done, with every member contributing integral pieces to the final product. We're very proud of what we're able to accomplish and the ground we were able to cover with these three songs."

TRACK LISTING:

1. 20 Years Lost
2. The Light Between The Distance
3. Collections Of Nothing

MARKETING POINTS:

FOR FANS OF:
Saetia, Loma Prieta, Pageninetynine

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Soul Glo "Diaspora Problems"

LP - $14.00
LP UPC: 723314784076
INDIE LP UPC: 723314784144
STREET DATE: 1/13/23
CAT #: SV21
LABEL: Epitaph / Secret Voice

Late December 2020 found Soul Glo holed away in an unfinished warehouse, beginning to find drum tones for their upcoming full length, Diaspora Problems. They had just begun to accept that they would be in talks with Epitaph Records, and that it was likely they were going to go with the label as they hadn’t even begun to reach a place where they could consider shopping it to other record labels. Working with Epitaph was far and away the best case scenario that the band could’ve hoped for, but they simultaneously wondered if the label had any understanding of what they were getting into.

From 2016 to 2021, Soul Glo conceptualized and produced Diaspora Problems nearly completely alone. The demo and tracking process was handled exclusively by the band’s bassist GG and engineer/close friend Evan Bernard. The final tracks were recorded in that same unfinished warehouse and the band’s practice space during the hottest parts of summer 2021.

Thematically, Diaspora Problems is a simple analysis of where Soul Glo currently finds themselves: poised to leap into their future, for better or worse, with nothing but their life experience and lessons learned to communicate, and only each other to rely on. Lyrically, the album deals with analyses of the music industry as it exists through the eyes of people who are experiencing it for the first time. Aside from that, the concepts explored include an artist and individuals’ self-doubt and self-hate, past traumas that can only be worked out in adulthood, financial instability and how it affects an artist, the effects of institutional and state violence, and the power of community that delivered Soul Glo through each struggle the band has endured from their inception and before.

Diaspora Problems is only the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a bright future for Soul Glo, as well as a forecast for what the band is capable of musically. Hardcore punk is at the precipice of a sonic revolution as a higher variance of people find room for themselves and the expression of their lived experience within the genre. More and more people will be injecting a cultural identity and offering a narrative previously unheard and/or underappreciated by punk rockers and kindred spirits the world over. Diaspora Problems is not aiming to be the only album like it that exists, but instead one of many entries in a new dawn for rock music.

TRACK LISTING:

1. Gold Chain Punk (whogonbeatmyass?)
2. Coming Correct Is Cheaper
3. Thumbsucker
4. Fucked Up If True
5. Jump!! (Or Get Jumped!!!)((by the future))
6. Driponomics (ft. Mother Maryrose)
7. (Five Years And) My Family
8. The Thangs I Carry (ft. Bearcat)
9. We Wants Revenge
10. John J (ft. Kathryn Edwards and Zula Wildheart)
11. GODBLESSYALLREALGOOD
12. Spiritual Level Of Gang Shit (ft. Mckinley Dixon and Lojii)

MARKETING POINTS:

• CD/Digital on Epitaph, Vinyl on Secret Voice
• Mixed and Mastered by Will Yip (Turnstile, Angel Du$t, Code Orange

FOR FANS OF:
Denzel Curry, Jeromes Dream, Gulch

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