Heave Blood & Die: Everything Is Now
What do the collective works of controversial transgressive fiction author J.G. Ballard, Hungarian postmodernist screenwriter László Krasznahorkai, and America’s ‘father of modern linguistics’ Noam Chomsky have in common? Apart from the common threads of the threatening dread of post-apocalyptic and dystopian worlds that rule the roost in their writing, they’re also the influence behind Norwegian anti-capitalist experimentalists HEAVE BLOOD & DIE’s fourth studio album Post People.
Post People is to HEAVE BLOOD & DIE what RIITIIR is to ENSLAVED, what Magma is to GOJIRA, and what Crack The Skye is to MASTODON. Post People is the physical and spiritual embodiment of a band opening up the floodgates of their feelings, finding their footing in a new-found world of experimentation. Whilst their groove-laden stoner-doom still lingers, HEAVE BLOOD & DIE are sharing a cautionary tale of post-apocalyptic properties across a backdrop of dream-pop, shoegaze, post-metal and prog-rock that slips and slides through unforgivingly bitter landscapes (Radio Silence), conspicuously beautiful dreamscapes (Geometrical Shapes) and the blistering bludgeoning depths of the darkness below (Everything Is Now).
It’s a special album made by a special set of people, but it was never once intended to be a genre-bending blizzard of experimentation. For guitarist and vocalist Karl Pedersen, bassist Eivind Imingen and synthist and vocalist Marie Mikkelsen, it was simply the sounds of a band getting back together in the studio following a pandemic apart.
“It really shines through that we’ve been so far away and apart for such a long time, and then just coming into the studio again together, with a lot of beer and having fun, it just has this really nice energy to it, and I don’t think we could have gotten it from having seeing each other two times a week,” enthuses Eivind, HEAVE BLOOD & DIE‘s newest member.
For a meeting of minds that came together over a night on the tiles, Post People is an album that evokes both the night before and the moments of the morning after. Coming from the conversations that keep you up in the early hours of the morning, the concept of the album’s thought-provoking title means something unique to everyone.
“I came up with the Post People expression, or sentence, and I found that it has had different meanings to each of us in the band which is quite nice,” gushes Marie, continuing thoughtfully. “For me, the expression started out with being like, what happens to me personally after post-meeting people, or post-having experiences, and then it’s expanded and expanded into different things: the world post-people, and ourselves, and what all of that truly means.”
There’s already so much to unwrap in one understanding of the album, but for Karl, it’s far more focused. “I have a couple I hold close to my heart which is the post-apocalyptic thing that it could be, but also in like a anarchistic transcending-authority and violence kind-of post-that, like the idea of ever getting past injustice.”
Whilst the influence of short story collections like J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition and László Krasznahorkai’s The World Goes On is climacteric to Post People’s genetic structure, so is to the world around us and it’s reflections. As anti-capitalists indulging in leftist and pro-humanitarian literature, HEAVE BLOOD & DIE are looking to use their latest effort as a social commentary of sorts for those to find hope in, as Eivind suggests, “I think when COVID hit, you could really see the inequality and injustice in the world, and noticing that the actual people who are standing on the frontline during this pandemic are not being taken care of or are getting the recognition they deserve, which I also feels reflects through the lyrics Karl wrote, so to me it’s like being on an album that fits the whole year really well, and with what we see and what we read.”
It’s a sentiment shared by the band as a whole, with Karl echoing. “I think also there are other things that reflect it as well, such as Belarus, which was people being killed by police at the same time as Black Lives Matter, but COVID, and everything else shadowed over the whole thing and I feel like you couldn’t really read about it unless you delved for it. You never hear about Eastern Europe, and generally the east, it’s always us lucky dogs in Western parts.” These conscious strains of thought have slipped into Post People’s stream of consciousness, as Marie explains. “There are so many cases like that, the sort of stuff you never hear about, and Radio Silence was one of the first tracks that we wrote for this album, and one of the first pieces of lyrics we wrote, and that was very much influenced by that, this idea that you hear what they want you to hear.”
As politically-conscious and socially-aware as it is, a protest album Post People is not, nor is HEAVE BLOOD & DIE in the process of becoming a protest band. In fact, whilst they’re happy for their art to be seen as a social commentary of sorts, just like the books it’s influenced by, they feel they’d be doing their fans a disservice by trying to feed their thoughts. Whether we as a civilisation can pull ourselves back from the precipice of total annihilation, or find ourselves falling into oblivion; HEAVE BLOOD & DIE have crafted not only a soundtrack to the apocalypse, but an album of the year contender, too.
Post People is out now via Fysisk Format.
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