Heavy Halo (McKeever)
photo by Irene
What are your top five albums that were released in 2024? (In order 1-5)
Christoph De Babalon - Ach, Mensch
Christoph crafts misanthropic, claustrophobic, and positively haunted jungle & DnB. I found out about him through an interview with Thom Yorke from the early 2000s. Apparently he opened for Radiohead on the Amnesiac tour and freaked out audiences with his beautifully fucked tunes. His new EP delivers the goods, best heard on bassy headphones LOUD.
Chat Pile - Cool World
An album borne of necessity that reflects our country’s unique flavor of dystopia.
These lyrics chill me to the bone:
"To be lost, to be whole, to be bought, to be sold
To lose hope, to lose God, to find hate, to find law"
This couplet skewers the hollow promise of the social contract. Gaze into the mirror and behold your cracked visage, America!
Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere
If Chat Pile’s record forces you to confront our ugly reality, Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere searches for transcendence through universal humanism and communion with the sublime. If you think that’s all hippy-dippy nonsense your cynicism will melt after listening. This album makes you want to believe…
Curses - Another Heaven
I have a ton of respect for everything that Johnny Jewel touches, from Chromatics to Glass Candy and beyond. I mean David Lynch selected him to perform on Twin Peaks, enough said.
As a fan of Curses too, I knew I had to listen when I heard Johnny co-produced this album. Sonically, the record hits all the sweet spots of post-punk, industrial, and darkwave. The title track walks the elusive tightrope of euphoria and despair that every songwriter should strive for. Plus, the lofi orchestra samples just rule.
Charli XCX - Brat
This is an obvious pick, but being someone generally skeptical of pop music and celebrity culture, I thought this one would pass by me, despite liking Charli’s work in the past. But then I heard “Sympathy is A Knife” and loved it. I was taken by how the album presents a slick 365 party girl worldview but with enough vulnerable cracks in the mask to show you true self-doubt and uncertainty.
2. What band did you discover in 2024 (can be a brand new band or an older band) that had an impact on your life? How so?
What band did you discover in 2024 (can be a brand new band or an older band) that had an impact on your life? How so?
In 2024 I got deep into the discography of Gridlock, RIP lead member Mike Wells…
This electronic project’s trajectory moves from industrial into some type of post-industrial IDM. Their early records show clear influence from Skinny Puppy but then they mutate into something reminiscent of a goth’d-out Autechre. Unreal production and composition all round. My favorite album from them is probably Trace, which apparently only still exists because Mike ran into a burning house fire to salvage the sole copy on his hard drive…true dedication to the craft…
How will you remember 2024 (in terms of music)?
More so than listening to records, the primary way we’ve experienced music this year is live. There are so many inspiring artists in the Brooklyn underground scene from goth/darkwave bands to hardcore rave/industrial DJs to punk/metal thrashers. We voraciously consume it all. Genre is an arbitrary construct.
In terms of our band, we’ve written and produced more songs this year than ever before. I will remember hours in front of drum machines, sequencers, and guitars.
The bones of Album 3 are there, I cannot wait to lay down the vocals and finalize these tracks…
What can we look forward to from you in 2025?
2025 for us is focused on dropping the remaining singles and videos from our album Damaged Dream and releasing both of our albums on vinyl for the first time.
As far as the concept behind the record, a "Damaged Dream" is what you're left with when the ideals you hold shatter. Cruel reality brings the hammer down on the purity of innocence, energy, joy, youth, love, creativity, optimism...
But while the Dream is Damaged, it is not completely destroyed. In fact, desperate times call for desperate measures, and you can use the longing spark deep within you as fuel to wage war against the negative forces pulling you down. You can reject nihilism and strive to reclaim your agency and meaning in a chaotic world.
I wouldn't call the album optimistic, but it lashes out like a wounded animal, refusing to go down without a fight...
5. What records are you looking forward to most in 2025?
What records are you looking forward to most in 2025?
There have been rumblings and rumors of new NIN material in the works, and we are both definitely looking forward to that.
As far as New York acts, I’m very impressed with the new Bambara single “Pray To Me” which is a super-charged shoegaze murder ballad. Amazing lyrics too…
Their new album was produced by Graham Sutton of Bark Psychosis, so you know it’s going to be next level sonically.
I met the Bambara guys while playing in a grungy warehouse on the same bill over a decade ago so it’s been rad to see them evolve and get their flowers.
How do you try to get your news to fans as media platforms and algorithms change?
Cutting through the white noise of the internet is increasingly frustrating cuz it’s a race to the bottom with the lowest common denominator “content” reaching the furthest. Everyone knows and feels this.
We’ll never be a band that takes a bunch of selfies or talks through the minutiae of every day on live streams. It seems corny, and frankly, it would be boring as hell.
So, we try to reach people through deliberate curation of our music, lyrics, logos, artwork, videos, and the worldview that drives them. We also make an active point of not focusing too narrowly on just the two of us. That feels like an ego-trip and there’s already enough of that out there.
This band is nothing without our friends, collaborators, and the underground scene we breathe in, so we try to bring shine to them as much as possible. No shortcuts, do the thing for real, everything spirals out from there…
Heavy Halo – social media links
- Instagram: @heavyhalo.nyc
