THE HEAVY ANNOUNCE BRAND NEW ALBUM AMEN

The Heavy have announced their brand new album AMEN out on April 21^st and available to pre-order now here. Marking the announcement, they have unleashed the first taste of the record with new single ‘Hurricane Coming’.

Tearing through like a buzz funk tornado, ‘Hurricane Coming’ kicks the door down 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 has been inspired by frontman Kelvin Swaby being caught up in Hurricane Irma soon after moving to the US. “The power of that, and it only touched us at, like, a one,” 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, even…”

With Daniel Taylor (guitar), Spencer Page (bass) and Chris Ellul (drums) remaining in the UK, the trans-Atlantic four-piece are embedded deep into Western pop culture. Their inescapable back catalogue has made them mainstays of modern radio, TV, cinema and gaming which is, subconsciously or not, familiar to millions and has knocked Mark Wahlberg for six, swept Obama to a second term and battered at the winter cabin windows of Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight along the way.

Their corrupted R&B power is unstoppable and, revived to full blast from the pandemic lull, they’re hurtling into 2023, whipping and writhing with seditious blues drama, soul and gospel passion, the crunch of prime hip-hop and garage punk’s visceral electricity pulsating through AMEN.

Elsewhere on the new album 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, while AMEN has further broad stylistic sermons to preach.

‘I Feel The Love’ jumps with the 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’ imagines The Stranglers as a bunch of ragged Southern shack shakers. And ‘Whole Lot Of Me’, ‘Feels Like Rain’ and ‘Without A Woman’ evoke the string-drenched classic soul of Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield with a sly modern crackle.

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.”

The Heavy are every bit as revitalised as AMEN sounds. “We’ve honed our craft,” says Chris, “we’re just better at what we do.” “It feels like a step-up,” Kelvin adds. “It feels like all of the songs are insane. There’s no filler at all.” He cites the merging of two separate ideas – one his, one Dan’s – to make ‘Without A Woman’ as evidence of the band’s natural magic. “That kind of shit is why we are the band that we are, because we can do that. We could be an ocean apart, but we still have this spark. It’s just there.”

The album was recorded at Rockfield Studios, produced with Tchad Blake (The Black Keys, U2) and engineered with Real World Studios’ Joe Jones. The songs were written during sessions in Florida at the end of their 2019 US tour and demoed when Kelvin visited the UK in February 2020.

As Rockfield Studios began to re-open in 2021 The Heavy snatched sessions where they could throughout the year, with Kelvin recording his vocals remotely in the US and the band “keen to be able to try and have everything based around the live performance”, recording live takes in the UK with Little Barrie’s Barrie Cadogan and the band’s on-stage keyboardist Toby McLaren filling out the sound. When possible, Dan travelled to Columbus, Ohio to record the voices of The Heavy’s regular gospel choir and by February 2022 AMEN was complete and ready for release whenever touring became viable again – i.e., early 2023.

Now 2023 is upon us, The Heavy return with the dials set to soul force 10. Their blistering new record is primed to get the airwaves and venues pumping this year once again. With the new music reveal today the band have also announced headline tour dates for 2023.

They will kick things off with two intimate UK shows in March, playing London’s Oslo on the 21^st followed by The Fleece in Bristol the following day. They will then return for a full tour in September across the UK and Europe. Tickets go on sale at 10am local time on Jan 27^th via www.theheavy.co.uk. Full tour dates listed below:

THE HEAVY 2023 HEADLINE TOUR DATES
March
21^st – London, Oslo
22^nd – Bristol, The Fleece

September
9^th – Cologne, Kantine
10^th – Berlin, Metropol
12^th – Amsterdam, Paradiso
13^th – Paris, Trabendo
16^th – Manchester, Academy 2
18^th – Glasgow, St. Luke’s
19^th – Birmingham, Academy 2

AMEN TRACK LISITING

1. Hurricane Coming
2. Ain’t A Love
3. Bad Muthafucker
4. I Feel The Love
5. Messin’ With My Mind
6. Just Like Summer
7. Stone Cold Killer
8. Whole Lot Of Me
9. Feels Like Rain
10. Without A Woman

FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE HEAVY
The Heavy’s osmosis rise was swift. At the height of the blues rock revival in 2007 frontman Kelvin Swaby and guitarist Daniel Taylor, having formed a strong bond over vintage soul and Jim Jarmusch, recruited bassist Spencer Page and drummer Chris Ellul, two student friends they knew from Bath’s insular classic pop circuit, to help them construct the sample-heavy “bedroom” debut album Great Vengeance And Furious Fire, released on Ninja Tune’s rock imprint Counter Records.

Within a year they began making waves Stateside then a live performance of ‘How You Like Me Now?’ – the lead single from 2009’s second album The House That Dirt Built – on The Late Show With David Letterman punted them straight into the American psyche.

The US decided it liked ‘How You Like Me Now?’ very much indeed. The track was selected to soundtrack a 2010 Super Bowl commercial, and feature heavily in Mark Wahlberg’s sports drama The Fighter. Before long the song was all over US culture. On TV, The Vampire Diaries, Entourage, Community, Rookie Blue and White Collar all featured the track. In gaming, it appeared in Driver: San Francisco and MLB 10. On the big screen, Horrible Bosses, Limitless, The Expendables 3, The Change-Up, This Means War and GI Joe: Retaliation all played on the drama exuding from its corrupted soul, an attribute that makes The Heavy’s music naturally cinematic. The song became so ubiquitous in the States that it was ‘How You Like Me Know?’ which played over the speakers at Barack Obama’s HQ in Chicago to declare his victory in the 2012 Presidential election.

The Heavy’s infiltration of the global subconscious was only beginning. ‘Short Change Hero’, also from The House That Dirt Built, became a TV sync mainstay, reached new generations as the theme to Batman: Arkham City and several Borderlands video games and even made it into real-life battle zones. “We knew a Special Forces guy in America,” Dan says, “and he told me they’d listen to ‘Short Change Hero’ in a tank when they were out on operations in Iraq.”

By the time 2012’s third album The Glorious Dead catapulted tracks including ‘Same ‘Ol’ and gritty gospel funk blast ‘What Makes A Good Man?’ onto adverts, TV shows, games and the trailer for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, The Heavy were pioneering a very modern method of rock’n’roll survival and prosperity; they were arguably the 21^st Century’s first major sync sensation. The band expanded the scope and ambition of their sound over 2016’s Hurt & The Merciless and 2019’s Sons, and grew increasingly tight as a unit, despite Kelvin moving to the US with his American wife in 2016.

They return in 2023 after a three-year pandemic related break with their sixth album AMEN, a self-released record allowing the close-knit band even more personal control to deliver the most fresh and revitalised record in their canon yet.