Week in Pop: Dan Koshute, Foliage, Half Stack

Post Author: Sjimon Gompers

Freak Heat Waves

Canada’s cool cats Freak Heat Waves; press photo courtesy of the duo.

Victoria, BC by Montreal’s Freak Heat Waves recently announced their upcoming album Beyond XXXL available April 6 from the French-Canadian connection imprint Atelier Ciseaux & Telephone Explosion & today share some exclusive reflections on the making of the new anticipated record. The principle duo of Lind & Thomas DiNinno have spent the past two years refining their approaches, ultimately become disenchanted with re-hashing the past’s established books & schools of anarchic audio alchemy. The result is a record that inverts everything you have loved about your modernist pop heroes, turning the conventions inside out in something that feels both dadaist yet very digestible. Beyond XXXL ».
On the track “Self Vortex”, FHW casts the audience into the eye of the storm in a kind of utilitarian approach to well-controlled components of chaos. They cast brooding deliveries into a dream pop vision anchored by post-industrial rhythm considerations. The tracks guitars squeak in loops that along with the chugging locomotive rhythms propel the track further & further, deeper & deeper into a void of their own design. The duo tailor human-tornado analogies into a track that is somewhere between a science project or a pop art provocation. This the sound of a group that was on a diet of nothing but the bands championed by the vintage music press outlets of NME (RIP print edition), Sounds (RIP) & Melody Maker (sigh, RIP) during the eras of the late 70s & 90s that infinitely inspired international troves of outcasts & misshapes to make the kind of realized noises that they alone want to hear.

Freak Heat Waves’ Lind & Thomas DiNinno wrote a mini-manifesto about the new record:

Beyond XXXL is a conglomeration of glitz and garbage. It’s grotesque & decadent. It hits eject on the commonplace. It’s triple glazed unreality. It’s a luxury brainwash. It’s a precise and twisted odyssey of mutated weirdness. Follow it down the drain, it will suck you into outer space.

Cover art for Freak Heat Waves’ upcoming Beyond XXXL; courtesy of the duo.

Freak Heat Waves’ new album Beyond XXXL will be available April 6 on tape via Atelier Ciseaux & on vinyl via Telephone Explosion.