Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Oakland-based band Heavy Lifter.
Heavy Lifter describe themselves, in a rather perfect string of words, as “queer post-bubblegum slut grunge”. And for the Oakland-based band who so tactfully rear and sear with layered guitars, rhythmic blows and melodic prowess, there is always unconditional love for the sweetness that often gets encrusted in the center. Releasing their debut EP park n forth back in 2024, a collection that is as reactive as it is intuitive of its surroundings, the noises become a prod, a voice, a lending hand; a presence to hold tight as these songs gather in the harsh dichotomy of what life really is. But as they blast through sonic textures that melt and stream down your hands like an ice cream cone predestined by the sun, these songs stick to each and every surface they come in contact with while the band embraces the sugary mess with both moxie and purpose.
About the playlist, Ren said;
We did an exquisite corpse of sorts – starting with one of us sharing a song to the next and then that person picking a song that came to mind while listening and then sending that song to the next person and so on. I made a diagram before we started that may make it more or less confusing to understand the process (attached – feel free to include or not!). A random person who was retired from naming things for a living told AL we should change our name to heavy lifting, we aren’t gonna, but we thought it was funny and the idea will live on as a playlist. The songs are partly things we are listening to now and partly things that got pulled from our memory banks after listening to the song that was shared. It’s been a challenging month for a few of us in different ways but sending these songs back and forth and then listening to them all together has been something sweet. Hope it’s sweet for u too.
towhead is the Oakland-based project of Walker Price, who recently shared the debut EP from the project titled Hollow Earth. The three-piece, made up of Price, as well as lj Canonizado and Finn Palamaro, wring out the grit collected within their elongated soundscapes, prioritizing their intuition to form these edged grooves and hazed environments that carry through with reserved intensity. Although only four tracks long, Hollow Earth grips your focus for almost half an hour, playing out a dramatization of the mundane, the shifting dynamics that choreograph our lives, almost always unbeknownst to us in the moment.
We recently got to ask towhead a few questions regarding their debut EP as well as what they have planned for what’s next.
Photo Courtesy of towhead
How did this project come to be? What is your relationship as a creative unit and how do you utilize that in the music you make?
towhead started as a bedroom pop / folk project a few years ago — i started playing shows under the moniker in 2021, but we didn’t start playing as a band until about a year and a half later. lj and i met in college, and finn and i met through music (i also play in their band called new not shameful). our relationship as a creative unit is definitely an extrapolation of a solo project, with me writing the songs and then spending some time with them before sending them to the band. we’ll experiment with arrangements for a little while before making any decisions. i feel super lucky to be able to make music with the two of them, there’s little that needs to be talked about when we’re working on songs, we end up on the same page nine times out of ten.
Originally beginning as a bedroom pop / folk project, what brought you to make a meandering and dynamic collection of songs like Hollow Earth? Was this an avenue that you always wanted to explore? In what aspects did you challenge your comfort zone while exploring this sound?
i think more than anything it was time. i used to have a really feverish approach to making a song; i would write a song, let it fester for maybe a week or so, and then record it to tape or on my laptop. with these songs i forced myself to be more intentional with my writing, and set out with some semblance of an idea in my head when i’d write. that idea would often end up blurred and only tangentially related to the finished work. i’ve also found myself listening to a lot more ambient and experimental music in the past 5 years, and thus gravitating towards writing songs that don’t necessarily depend on traditional structures. i think i’d kind of been using that as a crutch, and once i let go of it i felt a lot happier with and connected to what i was writing.
From what it seems, towhead has been playing shows frequently since you began back in 2023. How much are these songs influenced by your live performances? Did any of the songs go through changes the more you would play live?
oh absolutely. all of the songs on hollow earth have existed for a long time, and as we play together it helps us get a feel for what works best in what part. all of our songs are pretty long, and as we continue playing them we’re a little more able to take a step back and figure out when that length is the right fit for the song versus when it’s borderline gratuitous. i’ll also swap out lyrics a lot as we play live and continuously try to edit. the screams at the end of the last song (“witness”) were actually an improvisation at a show we’d played like a month before we recorded which i ended up liking enough to record.
As your debut EP, how did you want to approach bringing hollow earth to life? What kinds of things were you personally hoping to bring out of these songs?
i’m always reluctant to record and release music. I hate self-promotion and I find it really daunting to try to make a static, immutable, ‘finished’ version of something so personal and so constantly in motion. The impetus to record came from the fact that both finn and lj are leaving the bay area within the next few months, and we wanted to have a record of this iteration of the project. Brad [Lincoln], who engineered the ep, wanted to capture as closely as possible the sound of us playing live, and we only added a few overdubs after the fact.
Did documenting this iteration of towhead bring any comfort or confidence to making this EP happen, as you said you are reluctant to record and release music?
definitely! i think if anything it paints the recordings as an etching of the love i have for finn and lj. regardless of how i felt about the recordings (which, to be fair, i do feel proud of in and of themselves), we all have a sort of time capsule. it was a massive part of shedding that feeling of dread enough to actually undertake the recording process.
What can people expect from towhead going forward?
i’m doing a solo tour on the east coast next month with finn and their partner emily’s project imy3, we have a small west coast tour in the works for the summer, and there are a few songs on the back burner that we’ll hopefully be able to record together before the two of them move. beyond that, the project is going to continue, albeit with lineup changes. there is always stuff in the works, and ideally it’ll take less time to come to fruition than hollow earth did.
You can listen to Hollow Earth out everywhere now, as well as purchases a cassette and CD copy of the EP.
dog eyes is the lo-fi duo of Hailey Firstman and Davis Leach, who, as of signing to Grand Jury Music, released their sophomore album holy friend last month. This marked an exciting next step for the Oakland-based duo, as they continue to expand their range as well as evolve into their own endearing sound and conceptual vision as a homegrown project.
holy friend is a sonic reverie that flows through full, vibrant and admirable lo-fi production. It is not an album that rejects minimalism, playing amongst a multitude of layered harmonies and textured instrumental tinkerings, but rather one that embraces a process of both trust in the duos collaborative strengths as well as the simplicity in writing what you know best.
The intimacy at which Firstman and Leach perform from feels like the weight of a large and colorful comforter. Hiding underneath one was often what sleepovers were resorted to as a kid – flash light in hand, accidentally blinding one eye at a time, only to keep the party going in forcefully hushed secrecy because you know you were supposed to be asleep an hour ago. Those are the moments that stick to you and dog eyes knows it. As a collection, holy friend is an embodiment of memories like that, the small things; uncontrollable fits of cry-laughing, awkward relational firsts, finally knowing that your roommate’s dog loves you, the last drive in a cherished old car, or simply just making music with your best friend.
We recently got to catch up with the duo, discussing their strengths as collaborators and friends, articulating relationships through unique lenses, defining all goodness through the ‘holy friend’ and obviously, dogs.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Photo by Tyler Hentges
Shea Roney: Congrats on the release! How has it been going since the rollout?
Hailey Firstman: It’s been great! It feels really good to have it out there.
Davis Leach: It’s definitely the most exciting release that we’ve ever done. It’s just been really cool connecting with random people who reach out because they listened to it.
SR: Having worked closely together before on Mr. Marigold and your dog eyes debut, good, proper send off, were there any shifts, not only in your style, but the way you two collaborated that you saw stand out on holy friend?
HL: Well, we initially started working together on my project Mr. Marigold when Davis offered to help me record it and that’s when we first became friends. I feel like with each new thing we’ve done it’s been a progression of our tastes together, and also a progression of what we like when we’re making stuff together. It’s just really fun.
DL: I mean, all of it is just fun. I feel like, at least right now, this is just kind of our hobby. So you know, we both have jobs and whatnot. But with holy friend, [speaking to Hailey] were you living in the Bay Area at that point?
HF: I was probably halfway through moving.
DL: Okay yeah, so that first album, [Hailey] was living like three hours south, so she would come up, and we would just have weekend-long benders of recording music, and that kind of formed our habits. We’d be up really late every night and on Sunday night she would leave at like 2 AM. But when recording holy friend, there was part of it where she was actually living up here.
HF: So it was a little slightly healthier. Maybe a little [laughs].
SR: The album comes together in such a beautiful collage of sounds and textures that still feel cohesive as an overall project. I am wondering where this collective idea came from. Was it brought out with each individual song to match meanings and expressions or was it decided on prior to recording?
HF: I think that we do something where we both get really into specific albums at the same time, where we can’t stop listening to them. We had a couple like that. So it’s definitely some of those albums mixed with what we feel in the song.
DL: Essentially it comes down to everything we can do to rip off this album [laughs]. But then the thing is, it never sounds like it, just because, you know, we’re doing home recording with a synthesizer and like a weird loop pedal that makes weird sounds, so we try and then something else happens and we end up chasing that.
HF: There were definitely some songs where we knew what we wanted them to sound like. The song ‘fair’ was all on GarageBand and my vocals are on my laptop microphone and I recorded them when I was laying in my bed. True bedroom pop [laughs].
SR: I find ‘fair’ to be such a lovely song that holds a lot of nostalgic value in the way it was recorded and produced. Where do you experience auditory nostalgia, and in the case of this song, how did you manage to capture the expressions involved?
DL: I was gonna say adding the voice memo stuff is so easy to achieve that nostalgic feel. And I mean, it’s overused a lot, but I like when it’s just barely in there. If you listen really hard to ‘fair’, you can hear Hailey saying, ‘okay, we’re gonna start on…’ and it makes me think of blowing out birthday candles or something. And then I think just trying your best to go either hyper digital to where it starts to sound messed up and robotic, that is a very nostalgic auditory sound for me. Or going the complete opposite direction, fully analog, like we have this busted up tape machine that we use a lot that is an easy way to make those emotions come out a little more too.
HF: Actually, the recording under ‘fair’ is from a completely other song that me and my friend made, and I just autotuned it to be in the key of the song. But I feel like there’s always nostalgia in hearing a random conversation with a good friend, and I also sped up my voice to be a little higher which kind of sounds like I’m a kid.
SR: I like how the song ‘moment’ feels to be given its very own standout moment on the album, living in this standard pop sound, but also continuing that emotional throughline of nostalgia as well.
HF: Well at first we were very into the idea of our second album being a pop album, like a true pop album. I feel like ‘moment’ is kind of the only actual pop song that came out of our making a pop album [laughs].
DL: But we did try a couple of other ones, but they just didn’t work as well as ‘moment’. That was probably the hardest song for me because it was kind of a pain getting that one done. And then at the end, I feel like we weren’t super happy with it until my roommate Cameron actually started mixing it.
HF: We have certain songs that we call “Hailey GarageBand songs” at first, where I just kind of get crazy with GarageBand or Logic. I wrote ‘moment’ while I was also producing it, which is kind of unlike a lot of other songs I write. But I just remember being very excited when I wrote, “if I could hold this moment in my hands”, and I had to check to make sure no one else has written that yet [laughs]. It can go both ways, it’s earnest and could not be earnest as well, and yeah, kind of hearkens to that early 2000’s cheesy love song, but it’s truly how I felt.
SR: More often than not, when we think of a relationship album, we are prone to think of romantic love or heartbreak. But what I admire so much about holy friend is I can jump from a song about losing a childhood friend to losing a cherished car, and yet it’s still a universal and relatable feeling that is just put through a different and unique lens.Can you tell me about your experience repurposing what a ‘relationship’ album can be?
HF: I think I am just very interested in relationships of all kinds in general and how people fall into patterns. Sometimes even when I am writing a song to understand an experience, even if it’s not an experience I’ve necessarily had before, it’s something I enjoy. Almost like writing a book about something that you’ve never done and putting yourself into a character or experience. You can feel it and you know it. It helps to process my own things.
DL: Yeah, I guess writing a breakup album, you know, happens a lot, but while recording holy friend I was really into thinking about platonic friendships and a lot of the rights and wrongs that can happen in those relationships as well. You can have a love song about a friend or a breakup song about a friend too, and that’s kind of what I was thinking about the whole time.
HF: That’s true, I mean, Nora my car, that’s also a relationship I had. I actually want to make a playlist with all the songs that I’ve written about my car now. But Nora had moss growing inside because there was a little leak in it, so when it rained, the fabric on the top would get wet and it started growing moss, like a free filtration system. But there is something about a big old car that is very emotional, and now I have my mother’s cube car, which is nameless, because it’s just not as cool.
SR: When expressing the idea of the ‘holy friend’, you described it as a perfect being. Can you tell me a bit about where the holy friend comes from and did its presence shift at all while the album was coming together?
DL: At the time I had a lot of friends and people close to me that I either felt I was wronging them or vice versa. I kind of struggle socially sometimes, so I was just thinking about all these different relationships that I have and friendships that I have and I guess I was just kind of combining them all into one person.
HF: [To Davis] I remember when you were first telling me about it, you said it combines the best qualities of them, so it creates an ideal being.
DL: Yeah, now that I think about it, it’s kind of religious. I’m not religious at all, but it is kind of like a God thing. I don’t know.
HF: Like Jesus [laughs].
DL: Yeah, like Jesus [laughs]. I can’t really speak much about religion or anything, but it was kind of like the goodness in all of my friends, and thinking about that makes me feel really good.
SR: Did constructing the holy friend through writing these songs help put your own personal relationships more into perspective? Especially when walking thisfine line with such nuance and consideration when writing about them.
DL: Actually, yes, like majorly. When I would start thinking about all of my friends, I’m like, ‘man, how can I be like that?’ I know my friend would always do this, why don’t I do that for this other person and just try to be positive and work on my relationships and actually be intentional. I feel like, right now, I’m kind of in a place where my closest friends are my housemates and we’re all actually moving out at the end of this month, so now I’m having to learn how to be an actual active participant in a friendship, which sounds insane, but that’s where I’m at.
Photo by Hector Franco
SR: Were there any types of relationships or emotional connections that you found were particularly difficult to articulate?
HF: For songwriting, I’ve realized over the years that there’s kind of a sweet spot with timing with where I’m at emotionally about a situation. If there’s too much emotion, it becomes kind of muddy, like if you’re thinking about painting and there’s too many colors, it can all start blending together. Sometimes it feels good, and I need it to happen to write a song, but it doesn’t always make my favorite songs. The romantic ideal, the romanticism, or the powerful emotions recollected in tranquility, I feel like the sweet spot is once I’m at peace with a person or a situation is when I’m able to collect the nuance, like as you were talking about, and even make it kind of funny, too.
DL: I feel like there’s a lot of humor in some of your songs [to Hailey]. Like ‘firsts’, some of those lines are really funny.
HF: Yeah, and letting it sit for a little bit, or sometimes I’ll write half of a song and then months and months later I’ll finish it and get even more tranquility from it.
SR: You guys do manage to combine humor with sincerity very well. I especially like the line “I don’t exist outside of his big ears” from ‘rusty, my dog’ because it deals with this universal sense of placement and belonging that many different types of relationships have, but so adorably told through the eyes of a dog.
DL: Being perceived by a dog just melts me completely. I’m specifically singing about my roommate’s dog. His name isn’t actually rusty, but you know, that’s off the record [laughs]. I love him so much and I find myself just wondering, ‘what does he think of me?’ I always read these articles of people talking about how you need to pay attention to your dog because you are their ‘everything’, so I was thinking what would it be like to only exist to my dog, and nothing else. It’s a funny song, and it’s cute and sweet because I got my housemates involved, but it can be weird the more you think about it. I mean, we do have a lot of dog related stuff, I mean the name dog eyes, but there is so much beauty in dogs.
SR: Do you have a dog, Hailey?
HF: I don’t. I actually didn’t grow up with any animals because my mom is allergic. But I’ve lived with a dog and that’s when I started thinking about dog’s eyes. I was gonna say that one time I was Googling dog eyes, as one does, and this article popped up that was titled something like “Seeing God in your beloved dog’s eyes”. I didn’t read it, but I really liked the title [laughs].
Photo by Hector Franco
SR: Do you guys have anything coming up that you are looking forward to?
HF: We have a lot of songs we are looking forward to recording! We have a shared notes folder of the songs that we’ve each written or songs we’re writing together, and we just keep them all there for a while and simmer with them. It’s pretty giant, which is a cool problem to have, but this is the longest pause we’ve ever taken between albums and I think that’s good.
DL: Yeah and again, at least for right now, this is just a hobby for us. But with the signing to Grand Jury and having a lot of people listening, like way more than ever before, we’re definitely thinking about recording our next record, playing a lot of shows, or maybe doing a small tour. But at the end of the day we just really enjoy making music because it is just very foundational to our friendship.
holy friend is out on all platforms now as well as a limited edition deluxe cassette of holy friend and dog eyes’ first record good, proper send off.
Written by Shea Roney | Feature Photo by Hector Franco
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