Documenting The Void: An Interview with Heavenly Blue
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Started in the aftermath of Michigan band Youth Novel, Heavenly Blue is a seven-piece screamo/post-hardcore outfit that just issued their first release, We Have The Answer. Taking inspiration from a range of sounds in the genres of punk and hardcore, Heavenly Blue delivers an impressive collection of songs with their record. Swim Into The Sound guest writer Nick Miller recently sat down with guitarist Maya Chun and bassist Jon Riley to discuss the album, their musical influences, the band’s upcoming plans, and their love of Texas gas station food.
Heavenly Blue just got off a tour with Frail Body last month. How did that go?
Maya: It went super fucking well. I don’t think it really could’ve gone any better.
Jon: Yeah, the shows were well attended. We played with some great locals, which is always a plus. We met a bunch of pals that we hadn’t met before in person. It was cool.
In your Bandcamp bio, it says, “Screamo with dignity and integrity.” I feel like the screamo label can be sort of divisive. Some people get a little embarrassed, but Heavenly Blue seems to embrace it. What are your thoughts on “screamo?”
Maya: Like the word and label?
The use of it. Some people are like, “I don’t know. I don’t really consider us a screamo band.” That’s kind of a standard thing you hear.
Jon: I would say it’s divisive, even internally. I personally don’t enjoy music labeled as “skramz,” but I do like bands that refer to themselves as screamo now, and I’m also into bands that referred to themselves that way in 2008. So I think it’s come full circle for me, where it’s like – okay, I like post-hardcore, metalcore, and screamo, that’s fine. I like “real screamo” screamo, that’s fine. I’m really not a big fan of “skramz,” both as a label and as a genre classifier that has a sound. I just don’t really like it. I guess some of our songs are screamo songs, some of our songs are decidedly not screamo songs. They’re way more post-hardcore. There’s some noise rock-y bits. The label screamo is kind of tongue-in-cheek, when we say, “With dignity and integrity.” It’s like a little inside joke.
How do you feel about genre labels in general? It feels like everything is a mix of different genres, so it’s kind of hard to place bands into genres today.
Maya: Especially these days, I would say a lot of music is just everything.
Jon: Yeah.
Maya: I think it’s helpful to have genre labels to understand today’s music specifically, but at the end of the day, if you don’t understand genre labels and you just listen to cool music, you’ll probably make cool music.
Jon: I think I’m similar to Maya in that I have a hard time with labels. We had this discussion on tour. What actually is “mathcore?” … I don’t think I like mathcore, and Maya says she likes mathcore. But I do like white-belt grind and Maya’s like, “Those are mathcore bands.” Now I’m thinking about the Venn diagram of mathcore. I don’t understand mathcore, and I’m not even going to pretend to understand mathcore. But then we have some songs that are kind of math-y. Like – what is that song even called?
Maya: “Looming?”
Jon: “Looming” is like seven-eight-nine-five-five-seven-eight. The counting is so messed up. I’m like, ‘Is that a mathcore song? Do I like our music? I don’t know.’
Maya: That’s just a Drew [Coughlin] song.
Jon: Yeah, it’s drummer music, and maybe that’s what we should describe it as. We have drummer music, and then we have guitarist music.
Maya: Yeah, that’s honestly more accurate, because you can tell bands like Ulcerate or Origin in the metal genre specifically – it’s all about the drummer in those fucking bands. And then you have other bands like, I don’t know – Necrophagus or fucking Brain Drill is obviously all about the guitars.
Jon: I think maybe we start the Venn diagram at guitarist music [versus] drummer music and then go from there. But I actually do think genres are helpful in just understanding where people see their allegiances. I think when a band tells me what genre they are, it’s more interesting for me not because I’m trying to be like, “You’re not a real screamo band.” But it’s like, “Oh, but you listen to that stuff, and those are the things you’re influenced by, and now when I’m listening to your music, I’m listening for the things you like.” I think that’s kind of how I think about it – genre’s just like your influences now because everything is everything.
When you’re writing music, are you conscious of what your influences are, or do you let it sit subconsciously and figure it out later?
Jon: I personally only write music after I’ve been listening to other music. I never just wake up in the morning and have a riff in my head. I’m always listening to an Unwound song, and I’m like, “Oh, the way that song builds and everything is chaos and catharsis – I would want to do that for a Heavenly Blue song,” and I kind of use that motif as a starting point… I’m not taking notes or even riffs or whatever, I’m mostly just taking musical concepts and motifs, and seeing how I can interpret them in our musical lexicon.
Maya: It’s sort of a mix for me. Obviously, we were just on tour for Frail Body for two weeks, and a couple of days ago – it was just a regular afternoon after I came home from work. I’m just playing guitar, and I’m like, “I have an idea.” And I write, for the first time in months, a song that’s like two-thirds Frail Body and one-third Nuvolascura, because I just love Nuvolascura. I think I get exposed to stuff and it influences me subconsciously, but then I’ll just randomly have an idea.
Talking about We Have The Answer, what do you feel like your influences were?
Maya: I think we all had a lot of pretty different influences coming into that record. … A fair amount of the guitar parts on that record are –
Jon: They’re holdovers from Youth Novel. Some John Dickinson riffs.
Maya: Yeah, John Dickinson wrote some riffs with us and sent them over following the release of the Youth Novel record, and I built songs around them, along with some older riffs. But for other parts of the record, I regularly take a lot of guitar influence, at least, from At The Drive-In and The Fall Of Troy, I guess as a quote-unquote lead guitarist or whatever.
Jon: Our drummer writes songs on drums, which is pretty different from most bands. There’s a few songs [like that] on the record. If you listen to the record, you’ll know which ones they are, because it’s very apparent. The drummer will write a drum song, and then we come in later. Maya writes guitars and we kind of workshop it and change the structure a little bit to make it more musical “song structure” sense. Because drummers have Drummer Brain and just want to drum, so you have to help them write songs. And then Kris, me, and Drew kind of jammed together, and we sort of talk about stuff as like – “Okay, so this song is ‘Screamo Banger.’” And that’s the way we think about that collection of riffs and parts. It’s all part of this song that’s loosely defined as “Screamo Banger.”
Maya: I barely remember what the actual name of it is. I just know it as “Screamo Banger.”
Jon: We have codes for all of our songs.
Can you tell me which one “Screamo Banger” is?
Jon and Maya: “...And Like That, A Year Had Passed.”
Photo by Kyle Caraher
Let’s talk about the Metal Frat at the University of Michigan. Is that where you two met?
Jon: We met on a Facebook group, but yeah.
Maya: Because of Metal Frat.
What did you learn from your time living there or just being around there?
Jon: I know all the different types of mold. The types of mold that can hurt you and the types of mold that you can cohabitate with.
Maya: I know how to shotgun a beer in less than a second.
Jon: I know how to book a show. I think I learned how to do that there.
Maya: The pedal board that I built there is still the one I have.
Jon: Learned how to live in difficult situations. One of the things living in an environment like that teaches you – it’s actually good training for being in a band. You might not always get along with your close cohabitants, and you often have to learn how to make it work in creative ways. I think that has made being in a band with so many people easier for me and Maya specifically, because we’re used to living with 24 people, sometimes more.
Maya: Sometimes I forget that. It’s just like – yeah, I used to live with 20 fucking people.
Maya, you recorded and mixed much of the album. What were your goals going in? Did you have an idea of what you wanted it to sound like specifically?
Maya: The drums for seven of the songs were recorded in Baltimore when Drew was still living there. The remaining three or four songs we recorded here in different capacities. Due to the nature of how we recorded it, because it’s hard to get seven people in a room together, I think I just wanted it to sound as good as I could. And I think I also have a pretty distinct idea of what sounds good at the end of the day, and I think that’s born from listening to a lot of metal and maybe idolizing Devin Townsend in my early years, and loving “Wall of Sound” production. I just like things to sound big; I like things to sound live. I guess my ideal mix is the perfect live show experience. I can be both very forgiving and very picky about how I do that, which I why I spent like three months agonizing over the mix every day, for many hours every day. I really like mid-2000s Kurt Ballou. I really like fucking Adam from Killswitch [Engage]’s mixes of all those early metalcore records, like Norma Jean’s, Bless The Martyr and shit. I just like those dirty-ass, hard-hitting, stupid records. And I also played djent in the 2010s, so I can’t escape that either, I suppose.
What is your background in audio engineering?
Maya: I was self-taught from middle and high school. I was just on the internet, I didn’t have friends in real life, and I liked progressive metal. So I really didn’t have anything else to do other than just make music in my room alone.
Jon: I’m gonna interject and say Maya made quite possibly the best post-rock metal record of the 2010s when she was in early high school.
Maya: I did no such thing.
Jon: She lies to you.
Maya: It’s a prog record.
Jon: It’s a prog record but it’s actually great. It was one of the things where I was like, “This person has to join Metal Frat because one – you can record Youth Novel. Two – the record, it was better than anything I’ve ever done to this day.
Maya: That’s not true.
Jon: It’s true.
What’s it called?
Jon: The project was called Goodthink, and the record is called Ascend. Is that right?
Maya: That’s correct. I released that in the summer of my senior year, just about to go into college.
Jon: That’s in writing, Maya. Everyone who reads this is gonna go listen to that record, and they’re gonna be like, “Wow.”
Maya: No, they’re not. They’re gonna listen to the first record and be like, ‘What is this Dream Theater bullshit?’
Jon: Maya’s magnum opus.
Maya: It was definitely my magnum opus at the time, in high school. Yeah. And that was 11 years ago.
Jon: Sorry to derail your question. Maya sells herself short. She’s been very good at audio engineering for a long time.
Maya: Then I went to U of M and did the Performing Arts Technology program, which is essentially their audio engineering program, for a few years. Now I’m here.
Do you think you’re going to keep recording the band?
Maya: Unless a lot of money is handed to us, with the condition being Maya doesn’t record the band, then sure, yeah. I’d like to, because I just like to.
Let’s talk about the album art. Where did that come from?
Jon: So that was me. … It’s an interesting story. We kind of went back and forth on a lot of concepts for the album, just in terms of how the songs made us feel, or what are the types of imagery that kind of encapsulate both the lyrical and sonic content. God, I sound like I’m being a dick. I kind of feel like an asshole. You can tell I went to art school. So anyway, I kind of bounced a bunch of ideas off people. The things that kind of stood out were [that] it feels brutal and dense and kind of obstructive. It feels like it’s just in the way of something, but you don’t know what. It’s just like a rock in the middle of the road. It feels impactful. But then other people were like, “It makes me feel de-personified and absent, like the void.” So I kind of looked for a bunch of themes, and one of the things that stood out to me was the desert. And Maya’s like, “This is not a desert album.” And I was like, “It’s not a desert album.” Still think it was a great concept.
Maya: It’s not a desert album.
Jon: It’s not a desert album.
Maya: We ain’t Kyuss.
Jon: We could be, though.
Maya: We’re not Kyuss.
Jon: I’m telling you, Maya. The stoner rock arc is the next record, for sure.
Maya: I don’t think so.
Jon: Anyway… I kind of started to do some digging into the archives on those themes, and I found this photograph from 1960s San Francisco political organizing. I’m not gonna mention who the person in the photo is. That’s part of the purpose of obscuring their face – so you don’t know. It is a person from the San Francisco Bay Area who was integral in moving forward progressive politics in that time period. We obscured all the faces from that image in hopes that you understood that de-personification that we were feeling when we listened to it or when we wrote it… There are some other elements to the art, specifically the layout. The physical record has one of the alternative covers that I looked at, which is a person performing a ballet dance on a stage from the exact same event that you’re looking at in the first image. Part of it has to do with – you don’t know who these people are, you don’t know what the event is, but they’re obviously doing an evocative act. This is a performance of some sort. And that’s kind of how I view the record. I don’t know how people are going to describe it, but I know that they’ll kind of have a hard time. But you’ll listen to it. You have to kind of engage with it. You have to work through the songs to hopefully get what we were trying to do. … Oh, and the cross. This is the last thing I’ll say.
Maya: Oh, yeah.
Jon: Part of it was like, “What if we name the record We Have The Answer and put a cross on the cover? Are we a Christian band?” That was one of the things we kind of joked about. … But also, I’m personally interested in text-based design, and I like when people break conventions with text in a design. So I was trying to go for something that kind of mimicked the image. So if you look at the cover, you’ll see the person on the stage with this hand pose, and the text is supposed to kind of be a mirror image of that just in the shape of everything. It’s purely aesthetic, is what I’m saying. It’s not Christianity.
Are you going to put out lyrics with the album?
Maya: I think we are, yeah.
Jon: I know that they are in the liner knows. I don’t know if they’re going to make it [online]. … They are in the liner notes with the exception of some lyrics that we have withheld from the song “Certain Distance,” because some of those lyrics were written by the first vocalist of Heavenly Blue. We’ve already gone through one vocalist. That’s our friend Nathan. Nathan didn’t want to be in a band anymore. Nathan’s a spiritual member.
I’m fascinated with sequencing and how people come up with that. Can you talk about how you decided on the order of the tracks? Was that carefully thought through?
Maya: I think usually I’m generally the one who does it. I’ll bring a certain tracklist to the band and be like, “What do you guys think of this?” And everyone will give their input and we’ll change it. We’ll have another tracklist and if we like that, we’ll go with it, or if we don’t like it, we’ll make some more changes.
Jon: With this record, I think Maya was intimately familiar with the songs.
Maya: That’s every record!
Jon: But this one specifically because you mixed it for three months straight.
Maya: How long – we worked on the Youth Novel record for seven years.
Jon: You worked on the Youth Novel record for seven years. I worked on the Youth Novel record for a total of three weeks. Anyway… I think there is an arc to the sequencing. The way that it sort of goes, which is kind of funny, is it goes in chronological order of how the songs were written.
Maya: Pretty closely, yeah.
Jon: So you kind of see the creative process of this band forming in this record. The first couple songs are all Youth Novel holdovers.
Maya: That plus riffs that John Dickinson wrote after the Youth Novel LP.
Jon: And then there’s the drummer songs, which are the middle of the record, and … kind of like a junction. Drew actually recorded drums for those songs before the songs were completed. Just recorded drums at the studio because we paid for studio time.
Maya: I had written the songs around it by that time, but they weren’t done.
Jon: The last three or four songs me, Kris, and Drew wrote together in a collaborative way, the skeleton of, and Maya took it into a DAW [digital audio workstation] and finished. That’s kind of how the sequencing came to be. I do think there’s kind of an arc of more melodic content at the beginning, and then it goes into more math-y, abrasive content in the middle, and then this build-up and fall-off for the last two tracks. I think there is a sequence. I don’t know if it was as intentional as most people because we didn’t sit down and write this record in a month. This record took two years, so it was a long process.
How do you see the writing process changing going forward, now that you sort of have a base?
Maya: We’re out of Youth Novel riffs. No more.
Jon: I’m ready for our new stuff because I do think it sounds a lot more like us, like the people in the room who are making the music. We got together and went to a cabin in Port Hope, Michigan [in] the thumb of Michigan. … [We] got together for a weekend, hung out, and wrote five or six songs. Parts for songs. They’re not done, but –
Maya: That, plus everything else we have – we have like 47 minutes of raw material for the next record.
Jon: We have a lot that we are toying with. I’m excited to start the next record.
Heavenly Blue is playing a couple of festivals this summer. Will you be touring on the way there?
Maya: Four shows, including PUG Fest.
Jon: Yeah, we’re doing a slew of shows with Dreamwell. … That’s gonna be fun. Good band. They put out a good record last year. And then we’re playing some shows before New Friends Fest with an unannounced band that I’m not gonna name yet. We’re gonna wait a little bit longer. We are gonna be playing with Flooding again, I think. We love Flooding. Best band ever. We got to play with Flooding for three dates on this last Frail Body tour. We’re hoping to play some shows with them because they’re also playing New Friends and we love their music. And they’re also sweet people. And we might have some other stuff coming at the end of the year.
What do you like to eat on the road?
Maya: Buc-ee’s
Jon: We fell in love with Buc-ee’s on the road.
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of Buc-ee’s. Is it a Texas thing?
Jon: It’s a Texas thing.
Maya: Yeah, it’s like a big, old truck stop, except there’s no trucks allowed.
Jon: It’s a truck stop without the trucks. It’s amazing.
Maya: They have a whole deli bar kind of thing for just jerky. They have fresh-made BBQ sandwiches. They have burritos. It’s basically like gas station food but cranked up to the absolute max, and also in Texas.
Jon: Everything’s bigger. I know they say everything’s bigger in Texas, but the sandwiches are enormous.
Maya: They were fucking good.
Jon: The cost-to-weight value of food there is unreal.
Maya: You can’t get a BBQ sandwich [in Michigan] that good.
Jon: Buc-ee’s is the best Texas gas station. I would say the other things we do for food – I don’t know, we try not to eat like absolute garbage. The band tries to buy people good food once a day because you gotta eat well to live a quality life, and we try to take that seriously. On this [last] tour, the band paid for everyone’s meals and we tried to buy ourselves good food. We love Taco Bell, too, especially for the vegetarians.
Maya: We’ve got some vegetarian/vegan people, so we usually have to take that into account. Most of us will eat whatever.
Nick Miller is a freelance writer from Ypsilanti, Michigan, primarily writing about the world of professional wrestling. He also enjoys playing music, reading, tabletop RPGs, and logging Letterboxd entries (AKA watching movies). You can find him on X at @nickmiller4321 or on Instagram at @nickmiller5678.
