Heads Are Heavy

After nearly a decade apart, longstanding partners in musical crime Julie Edwards and Marc Smollin have reunited under the moniker Heads are Heavy. The first missive from Heads are Heavy’s debut, “That Sounds Okay” proves the kaleidoscopic culmination of the long, strange trip spanning Edwards and Smollin’s beloved first band, L.A. art-prog iconoclasts The Pity Party, through Deap Vally, the acclaimed heavy-rocking power duo featuring Edwards drumming and screaming alongside vocalist/guitarist Lindsey Troy, through Edwards’ latest release, the album Deap Lips – a collaboration between the members of The Flaming Lips and Deap Vally that left no stone unturned in its fractured psychedelic experimentalism.

Embracing such oblique strategies, Smollin and Edwards scavenged the sonic detritus of The Pity Party to create new, unexpected forms. Pity Party split in 2012, with Smollin moving to Berlin and Edwards consumed with Deap Vally’s roiling success. But in 2017, Edwards found in her garage Pity Party’s Yamaha AW2816 – a sixteen-track digital recorder filled with surprising audio objet trouvés. Notes Smollin, “Julie and I have been journaling our musical minds together for our entire lives. Using that raw material, Heads are Heavy is the most developed expression of what we are truly capable of achieving without constraints.”