Photo credit: Kyle Caraher.
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 seven 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— out April 12 on Secret Voice— is an apt and promising description of the period in which the sound now finds itself.
The Detroit-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. These new songs carry the spirit of the band’s past while others sit in the realm of Heavenly Blue’s noise rock contemporaries. Heavenly Blue demonstrates a more traditional structure on the album single “Static Voice Speaks To Static Me,” which premieres today.
