“An overall hopelessness and dread”: Superheaven talk first album in 10 years

When asked about any overarching themes on Superheaven‘s first album in 10 years, co-vocalist/guitarist Taylor Madison replied, “Just an overall hopelessness and dread.”

It’s a fitting response for a band who have long carried the torch for the angst and grit of the ’90s grunge era. But it’s also fitting because, in the decade since Superheaven last released music, hope for a better world has only dwindled. “Every day, countries are threatening to bomb each other, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how long we can do that before someone just does it and then the whole shit is over,'” he says. “The world’s been crazy plenty of times and people thought the world was about to end and then time just moved on. But I do feel like there’s gotta be some kind of expiration date on this current division that we have between everybody. We’re all each other’s enemy.”

It doesn’t take long for these ideas to reveal themselves on Superheaven’s self-titled album in no uncertain terms–opening track “Humans For Toys” includes couplets like “Tyrants rejoice/The end is here,” “Children burned alive/Money’s everything,” and “Glorious times we’re living in.” But Superheaven haven’t gone full anarcho-punk or anything. They’ve always been more about conveying a vibe than delivering pointed slogans, and that’s still very much the case on Superheaven. The song that sums up the album best is second track (and second single) “Numb To What Is Real.” Its title alone captures so much of this album’s tone.

The last time Superheaven released an album was in 2015 with their sophomore LP Ours Is Chrome, and Taylor said in interviews at the time that the overall theme of that one was the financial struggle of being a full-time touring band that plays to a few hundred people a night. It came as perhaps no surprise that, a year after the album’s release, Superheaven ceased touring. But they “never officially broke up or [went on] hiatus,” co-vocalist/guitarist Jacob Clarke clarifies. “It was a miscommunication.” And though it did seem like a hiatus, it’s true that Superheaven did play at least once a year except the two years that live music was shut down.

“Our mindset was like, if we thought something was cool and worth it, we’re down to play,” says Jake. “And then things just kinda kept picking up… interest in the band started growing more, even with the younger kids. And we were like, ‘Oh hey, if we’re gonna play a little more than once or twice a year, why don’t we try to write a few more songs? So people don’t think, oh it’s a reunion band or something like that.’ It’s just a band that couldn’t tour full time anymore, because it’s expensive to tour full time and it kind of ruins your life a bit.”

Though Superheaven struggled to break through to a sustainable level during their more prolific early years, they left an impact that endured and they continued to reach more and more people after they stopped touring and releasing albums. Their mix of post-hardcore, shoegaze, and grunge made them a highly influential band within the crossover between heavy music and shoegaze, particularly amongst the bands who now tend to be called “grungegaze,” a sub-subgenre that could also be summed up as “bands that sound at least a little bit like Superheaven.” As shoegaze in particular reached younger generations and became bigger than ever, Superheaven’s especially shoegazy “Youngest Daughter”–a deep cut from their 2013 debut album Jar–went viral on TikTok and has since far out-streamed every song that Superheaven actually released as a single. As I write this, it’s hovering just below 150 million plays on Spotify, which is significantly more than any other song in their catalog.

By the time live music returned, the festival offers for Superheaven came in–Outbreak and Sound & Fury in 2022, Sick New World in 2023–and when the 10th anniversary of Jar rolled around, Superheaven celebrated it by going on their first headlining tour since 2016. The recent tours have been “night and day” compared to the ones Superheaven went on in the mid 2010s, says Jake. “People buy tickets now, people come to the shows, they are excited to be up front. And when I say people, it’s kids now. The youth have tapped into this type of scene, which is really awesome to see.”

By the end of that year, Superheaven rented out a house together for a long weekend to write some songs, and the seeds for their new album were sown. Taking themselves out of their environment like that was never something they did when they were a full-time touring band, partially because they never needed to; they were always together. Now, bassist Joe Kane lives about two hours away from the rest of the band, Taylor fronts Webbed Wing (which Jake also drums in), Jake fronts Clever Hour, and Zack Robbins does drums and studio work with multiple other bands, so they had to be a little more intentional about getting together. It resulted in the kind of highly collaborative, democratic songwriting process that can only take place when a band gets in a room together and everyone bounces ideas off of each other. Webbed Wing and Clever Hour don’t sound miles away from Superheaven, but this is a band whose sum is greater than its parts and the new album captures something that only exists when Taylor, Jake, Joe, and Zach all come together.

For the most part, Superheaven picks right up where Ours Is Chrome left off, and it also entirely meets the moment. It positions Superheaven not just as influential on the current crop of grungy, shoegazy bands but as contemporaries with a great new album. It finds them sticking to the trademark sound that they developed on Jar and solidified on Ours Is Chrome, a sound Taylor says came together very naturally. “I don’t recall it being a conscious thing where we were like ‘let’s sound like this now,'” he says, reflecting on Superheaven (who were known as Daylight at the time) transitioning from the melodic hardcore of their early EPs into the slower, more melodic sounds of Jar. He says they were listening to bands like Hum and Far, “stuff that was kind of heavy but still overtly melodic,” and the band also credits working with their now-longtime producer Will Yip on 2012’s The Difference In Good And Bad Dreams EP as one of the reasons their sound evolved the way it did.

“We learned what a melody was, what a harmony was. Our musicianship grew vastly in that two-year span,” says Jake. “We went in and recorded our last 7″, and [Will] was like, ‘Here’s a harmony you could do over it,’ and we were like, ‘Oh, you don’t have to scream as loud as you can?’ So that was a big part of it.”

Will became an integral part of Superheaven over the years–as he has with so many of the bands that Superheaven came up alongside like Title Fight, Balance and Composure, Tigers Jaw, Citizen, and Turnover–and he was brought in for vocal production on Superheaven. Though this time, Jake and Zach produced the album themselves. It’s just as much of a wall of sound as the first two Superheaven albums, but they captured a handful of different tones that make this album stand out from their others. The decision to make the record themselves also played a role in the decision to make it self-titled.

“We were kicking around names and stuff, and nothing really kind of felt right,” Jake says. “Someone threw out self-titled, I forget who it was, and we were like, ‘You know self-titled, that would be cool, that would make sense.’ We produced the record, Taylor designed the layout, there was just so much of us in there. So I think it just made so much sense. We’ve been using the Superheaven logo as the backdrop [on stage] now. Everything just kind of clicked. If we were gonna do a self-titled record, this would be the time. This is a great expression or capture of what Superheaven is.”

“I also just didn’t like any of the names we thought of,” Taylor adds. “Just Superheaven sounds good for this one. None of the other names sounded as cool.”

The one thing Superheaven didn’t decide to do on their own was release it, which a band of their stature absolutely could have done. Having worked with both Run For Cover and SideOneDummy back in the day, they’re putting this one out on Blue Grape Music, a newer label from ex-Roadrunner Records veterans Dave Rath and Cees Wessels (which is also home to Code Orange, Gel, Gridiron, Spiritual Cramp, and more). And in a way, working with Dave Rath was a long time coming.

“We’ve all known him since 2016/2017,” Jake says. “He was around signing Basement and Turnstile, so I remember him coming to the shows and being like, ‘I wanna work with that guy.’ So it worked out. He has all the control in the world [with Blue Grape] which I think is what he wanted, so he can push the stuff he believes in as far as it can possibly go.”

Taylor also adds that the level of control that Blue Grape allowed Superheaven to have helped seal the deal. “Our band has an overall sense of, we just have to do it the way that we want to do it–to a fault sometimes. But Blue Grape has really played ball with us in a lot of ways. We basically put it to them like: hey, we would love to work with you, but we don’t need you to put this record out. So if we do it, we want to do it as close to our way as we want it to be, and they were down with that from the start. And that’s not always the case.”

“They seem like they’re in it for… they wanna see bands do cool stuff. Obviously they wanna make money doing it, but they’re a little more in tune with–it is supposed to be an expression of yourself, it’s not necessarily supposed to be this thing that you craft specifically to sell to people. And I really like that about them.”

But, Taylor adds, “[Dave] will put us in our places sometimes. And I’m like, alright, we needed that.”

With the new album finally here, Superheaven are now gearing up to go on their most extensive headlining tour in nearly a decade, and the biggest one they’ve ever done. Support comes from three newer bands that are keeping the torch lit for the scene that Superheaven have long been part of: fellow shoegazy rock bands Glare and Prize Horse, and hardcore maniacs Spy. With all these new bands bringing new energy to the scene, and veterans like Superheaven still having plenty to say, Taylor says the scene today is “even better” than it was when they were first coming up.

“People want guitar, you know what I mean? People want to see rock music,” he says. “There’s kind of a lot of the same bands that are still doing well, and then there’s a lot of new bands. Like there’s Anxious, and I just did a tour with Modern Color and kids go crazy for them. They’re like ICP, man. They have fans that only like them. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We just have the same contemporaries and then new ones, and we’re just as friendly with all of them. I just feel like bands are in a cool spot right now, or maybe music is, in general.”

After this album cycle, Superheaven plan to stay active. They say another new album is “probable,” but they’re a lot pickier about what opportunities they take these days than they were as a young, rising band. “We did the grinding, we did the grueling parts of it,” Taylor says. “We don’t have to do that anymore.”

And as for all the increasingly shitty aspects of the world that remain out of our control? “All you can do about it is write badass rock songs.”

**

Pick ‘Superheaven’ up on grape vinyl in the BV shop.

Superheaven by Superheaven

Superheaven — 2025 Tour Dates
April 26 – Louisville, KY – LDB Fest*
April 27 – Saint Louis, MO – Delmar Hall
April 29 – Denver, CO – Summit Music Hall
May 1 – Las Vegas, NV – Fremont Country Club
May 2 – Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco
May 3 – Berkeley, CA – The UC Theatre Taube Family Music Hall
May 4 – Pomona, CA – The Glass House
May 6 – Mesa, AZ – The Nile Theater
May 8 – Austin, TX – Emo’s
May 9 – Dallas, TX – Ferris Wheelers Backyard & BBQ
May 11 – Chicago, IL – Metro
May 13 – Detroit, MI – Majestic Theatre
May 14 – Toronto, ON – The Opera House
May 16 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
May 17 – Boston, MA – Royale Boston
May 20 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel
June 6 – Nuremberg, Bavaria – Rock im Park*
June 7 – Nürburg, Germany – Rock Am Ring*
June 8 – Paris, France – Backstage by The Mill
June 11 – Berlin, Germany – Urban Spree
June 12 – Hradec Králové, Czech Republic – Rock For People 2025*
June 13 – London, United Kingdom – Outbreak Fest 2025*
June 15 – Manchester, United Kingdom – Outbreak Fest 2025*
September 20 – Louisville, KY – Louder Than Life 2025*

all non-festival dates with Glare, Spy, Prize Horse
* – festival date