THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Formed in 2022 from a spontaneous reunion between Lucas Harwood (King Gizzard) and Sam Ingles, Heavy Moss blend mesmerizing psych-rock with lush dreampop on their debut album Dead Slow. With hypnotic grooves, fuzzy guitars and rich melodies, the album explores new sonic territory while nodding to icons like Elton John and King Krule. An immersive journey through modern psych-pop, Dead Slow is out on King Gizzard’s own p(doom) records.
Dead Slow‘s first single Star draws the listener in with a mellow groove, driven by Rhodes keys and fuzzy lead guitar, before opening up into five minutes of lush, melodic dreampop. The track nods to Real Estate and My Morning Jacket along the way, winding towards its cosmic instrumental outro. The accompanying video mirrors this trajectory, with the band hatching a conspiratorial plot to make contact with two black-eyed aliens by branding their patch of earth with the shape of a star. ‘
Treadmills, the second single, is a jangly waltz that dances through several motifs before layering on woozy psychedelia as Flaming Lips might have done. The two tracks tease out the dynamism of Harwood and Kyle Tickell’s songwriting; Tickell lets his jangly pop envelop the listener, while Harwood’s songs are more ’60s inflected, stitching together disparate ideas in the spirit of Elephant 6.
Adding to the songwriting oeuvre is drummer Ingles’ offering Melt — a woozy, ambling epic nodding to early noughts psych-pop of The Black Angels and Dead Meadow. They’re drawn together in a coherent whole, though, through jammy, motorik-driven outros and an ambient haze that hovers over the album’s eight tracks.”
