Photo by Ulysses Ortega

Heaven’s Club is yet another band from the ever-prolific Bay Area DIY scene polymath Chris Natividad of Marbled Eye, Aluminum, and Blue Zero — all bands who put out some of 2024’s best albums — alongside Deafheaven guitarist, Shiv Mehra. Since forming properly in 2019 following the demise of their greater shoegaze outlet, Creepers, they’ve used the periods between their main projects to reconvene and record something that extends into new directions from it all. That day has arrived today with the release of Heaven’s Club’s new EP, Free World, a three-track listen that accounts for the tastes of the greater whole of their duo’s other work in the realms of post-punk, shoegaze, or metal in approaching tangent detours where time and space is afforded to expand their music multiverse through dreamy pop and psychedelia. Front-bookending the slowcore dissolution wave of the instrumental centerpiece “d(u)st” alongside the hippie-dazed, melancholic Brit pop of the extended play’s title track and conclusion is its highlight, “Destroyer”. It’s here where Natividad and Mehra are at their most urgent sonically in setting the scene of the collapse and disintegration that follows. New waves carrying disquieted vocal delirium on top of the currents alien-bound synths into the air bear the marking of an ominous existential journey. Like a distress signal not being heeded, “Destroyer” is doing everything to be seen and heard in a way that makes the subsequent heavy reality comedowns all the more of a headspin.

Directed by: Lauren Melton

Heaven’s Club’s Free World is available now on Born Losers Records.