THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Some of their finest work yet, Amen boasts 10 new songs of relentless energy from The Heavy, a band that have spent the past decade soundtracking huge moments in pop culture with their distinct brand of seditious blues drama, gospel-soul passion, prime hip-hop crunch and visceral garage-punk electricity. Among those moments: Their music battered has at the winter cabin windows of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, knocked Mark Wahlberg for six in The Fighter, introduced Barack Obama’s second presidential term and made them the first band to get an encore demand from David Letterman on The Late Show.
And speaking of massive events, check out the album’s first single Hurricane Coming. Tearing through like a buzz funk tornado, Hurricane Coming kicks down the door on the new era of The Heavy, opening their sixth album with an exhilarating maelstrom of ’60s R&B riffs, horns and gospel harmonies. It hits home for frontman Kelvin Swaby who was caught up in Hurricane Irma soon after moving to the U.S. “The power of that, and it only touched us at, like, a Category 1,” he recalls. “It’s just the way that relationships are as well. It was like, ‘Just be careful of taking something beautiful for granted’. Don’t take people for fools. There’s always something waiting, lurking.”
With Daniel Taylor (guitar), Spencer Page (bass) and Chris Ellul (drums) remaining in the U.K., the songs on Amen were written during sessions in Florida at the end of their 2019 U.S. tour and demoed when Kelvin visited the U.K. in February 2020. Amen was recorded at Rockfield Studios, produced with Tchad Blake (The Black Keys, U2), and engineered with Real World Studios’ Joe Jones.
Alongside Hurricane Coming, there’s the grimy swamp glam of Bad Muthafucker and gnarled roadhouse rocker Stone Cold Killer (about Dan’s new kitten — “that beautiful thing kills everything”) that bristle with the same untamed energies, inspired by Dan’s recent submersion into the YouTube channel of Alan Lomax’s classic field recordings. I Feel The Love jumps with Pentecostal pop fever full of Mississippi heat. Ain’t A Love tells the story of a deceitful old flame returning to town in dark, lumbering tones akin to a Morricone carnival. Messin’ With My Mind reimagines ’70s U.K. punk thugs The Stranglers as a bunch of ragged Southern shack shakers.
If much of the album finds Kelvin dredging the murkier depths of the romantic experience, there are hints of wider turmoil too. “I think we write very, very ambiguous songs that can be for a number of situations,” says Kelvin. “We’ve tackled that but there’s other shit going on in Just Like Summer as well, and throughout the whole of the record. It’s not just a relationship with your partner, it’s an environmental relationship, how we’re being looked after. There are so many divisions being sewn across the planet. There’s so much ‘truth’ that’s not truth. They’ll sell us all shit and we’re assuming that it’s gold. We have voices.”
Formed in 2007, four friends in Bath, U.K. constructed the sample-heavy “bedroom” debut album Great Vengeance And Furious Fire. A live performance of How You Like Me Now? — the single from 2009’s second album The House That Dirt Built — on The Late Show punted them into the American psyche. The song graced Super Bowl commercials, TV programs like The Vampire Diaries, Entourage and Community, films such as The Fighter, Horrible Bosses, Limitless, The Expendables 3, and video games including Driver: San Francisco and MLB 10. All played on the drama exuding from its corrupted soul, an attribute that makes The Heavy’s music naturally cinematic. How You Like Me Know? even played over the speakers at Barack Obama HQ in Chicago to declare his victory in the 2012 presidential election. 2012’s The Glorious Dead catapulted tracks including Same ‘Ol’ and What Makes A Good Man? into even more key films, shows and commercials. The band expanded the scope and ambition of their sound over 2016’s Hurt & The Merciless and 2019’s Sons.”
