After more than 200 shows in 3 years all over Europe, French emotive punks HEAVY HEART are about to release their 2nd studio album called “Love Against Capture” on Guerilla Asso, Inhumano, Monster Zero, La Agonia de Vivir and Brassneck Records on October 5th, and we’re thrilled to give you its first full listen below, along with a full interview with the band!
Slated for this Friday’s premiere at the official release party with Deathwish signees BIRDS IN ROW, “Love Against Capture” takes us on an emotional trip through interesting concepts of love and bonds, using them as a political weapon, and taking care of our relationships. Music wise, the album is brimming with infectious, nostalgic, yet powerful sounds that manage to set a particular mood that digs its way deep under the skin. “Love Against Capture” gives weight to our everyday actions, bonds, and struggles, has a wide-reaching sound that will easily draw in fans of pop infused melodic punk and rock, and delivers on all fronts.
Catch them live in Laval this Friday, October 5th with BIRDS IN ROW, FAT DEAD SHIT and Dj Rickpied VS Dj Treubard, and Saturday in Joué-lès-Tours, France with MNNQNS.
Recorded and mixed by Mathieu Zuzek in Sinsat-sur-Ariège, France between February 23rd and March 7th. Mastered by Sebastien Bedrunes. Cover by Mer Béton, Apolline Cornuet, and Nico Destructure. Inlay illustrations by Cora.
Here’s the official manifest and the general concept explanation, followed by our full interview below:
Would that record pertain to anything, it would be a political declaration, personal and collective. It reflects our existences, our commitments as wells as our doubts, sorrows and uncertainties. It is a digest. We have never thought a band could be self sufficient, cut off of everyday life, of reality, groundless, or that it could allow us to dig a hole to bury ourselves in next to the prevailing individualism, cynicism and careerism. There is no revolution to be achieved alone. Because, as we’ve said it before, and as we will keep on saying, to us music has never been an end in itself : it is a mean to political struggle, a field for experimentation where mutual aid, friendship, bond and solidarity take precedence. Music offers a possibility : creation opens new space-times, new fragments in which our desires are shaping, our power rises and our rage spreads.
We neither tried to write slogans to be sang with you fist up high, nor to settle on themes that every activist has to broach. In a word we did not want to compose a political program but to talk from where we’re at, from collective and singular experiences. We wanted to broach subjects we care about, because they are connected with our emotions, our sensitivities, our entourage, our experience. What affects us, what gives us joy, what moves us, what makes our senses live, what makes us sensitive. We do have a lot of things to say. But the “lyrics” form suffers with many constraints: it is complicated to be clear, to manage to say everything, in the best possible way, without being caricatural, simplistic, know-it-all, or clumsy. We don’t aim for revolutionary purity. We don’t aim to speak for everyone, or instead of anyone. We aim to contribute at our level, to overturn the existing way of things. But talking about our level does not mean glorifying staying amongst ourselves, wallowing in our roles of magnificent losers or putting on a pedestal the small breaches in which we can slip sometimes. Talking about our level comes to ask the following questions: From where do we talk? From where can we have a grip on the present? Who are our friends? How can we recognize them and organize together? Then, how can we cast a sidelong look at things? How can we think and act in a cross-disciplinary way? How can we make do? How can we prevent the confiscation of the investigation on the strategies and alliances, sometimes unusual, that we can build? Which are the desirable worlds we want to contribute to?
Love Against Capture then. Because this record seems to revolve around an idée fixe, a demand, a message we shout to ourselves, like we wanted to make the most of it, to internalise it, to put it into practice in order to make it real: tighten the bonds that join us, try to meet others, look after the relationships that allow us to live a common situation, to exist together in ever reconfiguring worlds. Love as a weapon against fatality and mediocrity. Love to escape the capture from this worlds that oppresses us, that requires us to make impossible choices, that crushes our existences, that pulls us apart while we are trying to pull away from it. That world of wholeness that aims to unify us, trap us, integrate us to annihilate our desires of secession, desertion, fragmentation, of creation of worlds in which we desire to live. Would there be one truth to hold on to, it would be that creation is on our side while power can only control, react and in the end, capture us.
At the risk of becoming schematic we use this binary statement because it hold a strong meaning. We have to become elusive, inappreciable, always where we’re not expected because we are facing a power that predicts everything, imposes absurd standards, and meddles everywhere: in our cities, our relationships, our lives, our brains, our bodies. That statement, even though questionable, draws an idea, may be just a hunch: the way we build our friendships, the way we love each other pertain to a revolutionary practice. It is a matter of becoming aware of it.
“The most intense point of lives, the one where their energy is concentrated, is precisely there where they clash with power, struggle with it, ordeavour to utilise its forces or to escape its traps.” – Michel Foucault, The Lives of Infamous Men
See the full interview below…
Hey guys! What’s up? How are you? How’s Nantes?
Hi ! We’re doing fine, thanks. It’s hard to describe Nantes, this is where we leave so and it’s not easy to step back to have a neutral picture… To be honest it’s kind of a nice place to live in, there is plenty of cool underground initiatives, we met most of our best friends there and it feels like we could still met others even after living there for years. But unfortunately it doesn’t escape from most of the issues that goes with this shitty world, because Nantes is obviously part of it… It has been getting gentrified a lot in the past decades, the police presence tends to be overwhelming, while hundreds of exiles are living in the street…
Oh man. That doesn’t sound too good. How was your Summer though? What cool shows and fest have you attended?
We’ve been pretty quiet this summer, we were all busy with our personal lives, and we let ourselves some time to focus on other projects that we care about. It felt kind of good to slow things down for a few months and to allow ourselves some proper holidays. We individually attended several festivals like Donnez Moi Du Fest (Angers-FR), Xtreme Fest (Carmaux-FR), Fluff Fest (Rokycany-CZ).
It’s great to see you thriving and being so active. The new LP comes out a little over 1,5 years after your debut full length and it’s filled with killer, passionate earworms that will surely stay with us for a while. How did you approach the writing and recording process this time?
Actually we didn’t really thought much about how we were going to write this album… At one point, we were tired of always playing the same songs, so we started writing some new ones. It turned out to be a bit more pop, we always plays pop songs but it got out in a little less fast and aggressive way than what we were used to. However we consciously wanted to take a new direction for the lyrics. We exchanged ideas about it before and we agreed on focusing more about politics and trying to mix this aspect with the nostalgic, personal topics that we always wrote about. In a way we think that those two aspects are too often separated, we do believe that politics spread in every details of our lives. Not that we should constantly be thinking about political issues, it’s more about considering how we do things and how we see ourselves in this world.
Do you maintain your own practice and other bands or projects outside of HEAVY HEART? Or is the band your only gig these days?
Heavy Heart asks a lot of personal time and energy, so it is complicated to have several musical projects aside from that one, but Antoine is doing it great in playing drums in Verbal Razors.
What’s the meaning of the title „Love Against Capture”? Can you give us some details on your lyrical content and the interpretation of the cover art?
You can find a text we wrote while we were recording this record up above next to the player, we think reading this is the best way to understand the meaning of this title.
The idea behind this record was to connect pop music and political radical positions. Like a friend said so, this album, among others, is willing to step out from the obligation to play angry music in order to sing a radical speech, and the clichés that comes along with pop music that is supposed to be sweet and naive. We also wanted to get rid of any kind of complex, we believe talking about love and joy participate in a way to a revolutionary approach, and we don’t think singing that on pop music turns it automatically cheesy. The title and the lyrics of this record are about using love and bonds as a political weapon, about making ourselves ungovernable and to resist to the capture of the state, which by the way is a concept we borrowed for the title of this record to Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze from their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
What do you hope us to get out of it?
We do not claim that we have a message to deliver to people. Of course we’d like our ideas to be heard because we worked on it for a while and it’s meaning is important to us, but we’re really not interested in preaching. To us the principal idea is to take care of the relationships that make us feel at ease, to take care of the worlds we try to create. This album is about giving importance to the bonds we share, and the streams that get out of it, always in a revolutionary approach : the way we build our friendships, the way we choose to love can be an offense to the power that constantly tries to capture us. Although it is also important not to trap ourselves in some shelters or self centered strategies, we believe it is crucial to open the punk scene to other worlds. If we want things to change we have to seal alliances, because it is great to create spaces where people can be themselves, relatively safe from this merchandised world where the economy, domination patterns and absurd norms rule over all, but that would be a waste to stop there and to be satisfied to live in a bubble that might pop up sooner or later. We have to pay attention at how we make our worlds exist and how we can somehow connect them. We got to keep in mind we exist only to make other things exist and the more our worlds grow, the more theirs get hurt.
Can you introduce each and every label involved in this project? Also, how important is the DIY distribution part for the band?
There is five labels involved in the release of the vinyl version of Love Against Capture. They are all friends that we met while on tour and we are super thrilled that they are part of it.
Guerilla Asso: it is a French label that have been created by the band Guerilla Poubelle. We have been super influenced by the bands that this label released especially when we were teenagers. They started to help us since the beginning of the band in many different ways, we still can’t believe it is happening.
Inhumano: Now based in Switzerland, they started to release records in 1998 (we were around 6 years old at the time…) in Chile, we played for their 20th anniversary in Lausanne last June. They helped us releasing our first LP Discoveries, before we even started to do shows…
Monster Zero: Kevin from The Apers / Insanity Alert is running this label in Austria. We really like the guy and a lot of records he put out. If you’d have to keep one european label that do Ramones pop punk, it should be this one!
La Agonia De Vivir: This is a Spanish label ran by Fon from Wild Animals. The label is awesome, there is a really sick distro online or at Wild Animals shows if you have the chance to see them play (spoiler alert : they are awesome live).
Brassneck records: This is according to us one of the finest label in the UK. Scott ran Brassneck records for years in Cardiff and he put out a lot of amazing records (ten this year only). He especially helped great french bands that are friends of us like Ghost On Tape (RIP) and Traverse. We met Scott when we were playing Wales in February 2017 and we fell in love with the guy.
We don’t go through mass distribution so it can be hard to get our music out of the inner circle of people that already heard about us. In this point of view it is interesting to have several labels located in different places in Europe and I think in a way it sums up pretty well what DIY means to us. We want to escape the music industry and we have to be creative about the way we can still spread our music and messages around while respecting our convictions. We think DIY as a way to help each other in order to build something together outside of a disgusting music industry, because there is other, more ethic, ways to do stuffs and tons of bands and labels are living proofs. Although it seems that the DIY’s name came to be used as a marketing label to sell stuffs (Some fast food company made an ad campaign about it for instance) and it kind of lost it’s original meaning… That’s no surprising because that’s how capitalism works these days: it feeds itself in assimilating everything – especially the attempt to escape from this system, like DIY originally is – and turns it into a way to make money in order to neutralize it. To conclude we’d rather say Do It Ourselves than Do It Yourself, because this thing to us had always been about mutual help and shared convictions. We know that the five labels involved in the record carry an ethic that is similar to ours and try to make it more than music, and we are really flattered that they are willing to do things with us.
Being involved in the DIY arts scenes of all kinds, it’s hard to imagine a similar platform that would be able to compete, and to offer the same vibrancy, vitality and Energy. Apart from this band and your involvement in the punk scene, what other guilty pleasures and activities keep you occupied? What feeds your hungry souls?
We are involved in La Dérive, which is an associative and autonomous bar in Nantes. We organize shows, there is a library, some meetings and reunions about social movements take place in there, and it’s an important meeting place for many different collectives. People involved in that project make their best to gather money (with the bar, by making food, etc.) to support local struggles. It is a place that is important to us, where we can meet, chat and organize with each others.
Antoine and Moreno are also part of a collective called Things We Say, that organizes a DIY festival every year in Montaigu, this year will be the second, there will be 25 bands over two days and we can’t wait to be there. It happens in a really awesome DIY venue called Le Zinor, in which Antoine is also directly involved. There is tons of shows and festivals there and this place is just perfect. Antoine also records some great bands, like Chaviré, Bleakness or Circles.
Lylian is participating, along with many friends, to the making of a political journal which is called Parades. The first issue whose name is “Trancher la ville” deals with gentrification process and insidious cultural policies in Nantes among other things, with an historic and actual point of view, on how we can reclaim our lives today in our cities.
Lylian and Antoine are also playing football in “La Commune de Dalby Football Club”, a friends team.
Louis and Moreno are doing screen printing in a living room, sometimes for fun, sometimes for Heavy Heart, sometimes Moreno does it as job in a cool factory. Louis likes to draw on it’s spare time beside studying sociology, and sometimes he does handpoked tattoos.
We just realized while writing this list that music is quite a small part of our lives after all, even if everything is related in a way… but we sure are busy guys.
To conclude this year’s amazing offerings thus far, can you give us your top 10 records and/or shows you experienced and would like to recommend to our reader ?
Here are some recent album that we really like/inspired us:
The Sidekicks – Happiness Hours
Warm Thoughts – I Went Swimming Alone
Former Member – Old Youth
Turnstile – Time and Space
The Creeps – Beneath The Pines
Spanish Love Songs – Schmaltz
Hugo TSR – Tant qu’on est là (released in 2017, but still relevant)
And here are some recent shows that blew us off:
Casey – August 2018 @ Transfert, Nantes (FR)
Mute – August 2018 @ Xtreme Fest, Albi (FR)
Justine – May 2018 @ Rhinos Féroces Festival, Montaigu (FR)
The Attendants – July 2018 @ Festival Canasson, La Boissière de Montaigu (FR)
Iron Maiden – June 2018 @ Hellfest, Clisson (FR)
Lawrence Arms – August 2018 @ Brakrock Ecofest, Duffel (BE)
Great! Thanks so much for your time guys. Congratulations on your new record and good luck with the promotional stuff. Wishing you all the best from Warsaw! Cheers!
Thank you for being interested in our band, we’re flattered that you gave some of your time for us! We hope you’ll keep on making reviews and interview cool bands.
