Detroit’s 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 album’s title track arrives today and Heavenly Blue’s Jon Riley comments, “‘We Have The Answer’, despite being the title track, was one of the last songs we finished on the album. Instrumentals had been tracked for as long as Juno or I had been in the band, but we didn’t finish the vocal parts until close to the end of recording the album. I usually take a long time to write, but this song came very naturally. It took one night of writing and a couple of vocal takes, and Juno is always good at completing and complementing the concepts I’ve started. WHTA embodies what Heavenly Blue is about. I feel like if you averaged all of our songs from the album together, this would be the center point of it.” They continue, “The drums for this song were recorded with Matt Redenbo at the Magpie Cage in Baltimore, MD. We had some songs demoed out with programmed drums around the middle of 2022 and Drew recorded this before he had even met the whole band. It made for a challenging mix process, with drums being recorded on different kits with different recording setups, but in the end, we embraced the different characters of the recordings and went for a more dense and raw sound.”
Heavenly Blue 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.
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.
We Have The Answer’s release through 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.
Heavenly Blue, on tour with Frail Body:
March 12 Austin, TX @ The Ballroom – SXSW
March 13 Little Rock, AR @ White Water Tavern
March 14 Memphis, TN @ Haven Haus
March 15 Nashville, TN @ drkmttr
March 16 Louisville, KY @ Kaiju
