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Love Will Save Us From Sadness, January 2024
Maxi Jazz knew what he was talking about when he said of music, “this is my church. This is where I heal my hurts”. These songs were written during a period of intense sadness and loss, and they’re our way of finding the crack of light in the darkness: they come from a sad place, but they’re songs of life, of love and even of joy. As the title track puts it: love will save us from sadness.
Love Will Save Us From Sadness is available on Bandcamp and the usual streaming services.
If You Should Go, June 2022
This is our second set of songs mixed and recorded at Novasound studios, and the title track once again features our incredibly talented friend Audrey Tait on drums. Both songs are about love and pain; If You Should Go is about encouraging someone you love to live their best life when you know that there’s no room in that life for you, and we wanted to release We Walk With Steel In Our Spines during Pride Month because it’s about the journey to becoming proud of who you are.
If You Should Go is available on Bandcamp and all the usual streaming and download services.
Nightmare Season (Let The Bodies Pile High), May 2022
Our latest single is a one-off blast of rage about *gestures at everything*. The title comes from an infamous quote by Prime Minister Boris Johnson about COVID: “Let the bodies pile high”.
Nightmare Season is available on Bandcamp and on the usual streaming suspects too.
Got You In My Bones, December 2021
Are you dancing? Because we’re asking. This is Prince-inspired loose-limbed funk with shuddering bass, strutting guitars and a sinuous, floor-filling stomp from Audrey Tait (The Girl Who Cried Wolf, Broken Chanter), who infuses the whole track with infectious energy until it erupts in a typically massive HAVR chorus.
Bones is followed by the anthemic, widescreen No-One Jumps On Rainy Days with its echoes of Pixies and post-punk guitar heroes, and the closing, joyful Big Gay Love song is indeed very big and very gay with its litany of queer stereotypes and knowing homage to Kurt Cobain, whose lyric “what else should I say? Everyone is gay” gave the song its title.
Got You In My Bones is available on Bandcamp and on all the usual streaming suspects.
Modern Rock Volume 2, 2021
We’re delighted to be one of the artists on Modern Rock Volume 2, a great compilation of up-and-coming rock bands from Great Music Stories. And we’re going to be on volume 3 too, because we’re great.
I Could Never Be Your Girl EP, December 2020
This EP is online from all your favourite streaming services as well as on Bandcamp for pay-what-you-like.
It’s a fierce one, kicking off with the furious and defiant title track – in which Carrie appears to be channeling the Sex Pistols while David wields his guitar like a chainsaw – before changing gear with the slinky Pavement Cracks, a song about feeling indestructible. It’s followed by the wall of guitars of Tribe, a tribute to found families, before offering a balm for troubled times in Don’t Let Go Of Hope.
Messengers EP, August 2020
Our Messengers EP is live on all the main streaming and download services, which you can find on this single handy page. It’s also available on Bandcamp (pay as you want, including zero) and Soundcloud.
We think this EP features some of the most beautiful, most emotional and most powerful music we’d ever released: the chiming guitars and slashing chords of Animal, the rage of Messengers, the juggernaut of Zodiak and the sad beauty of Time Will Put Your Enemies In The Ground.
It’s Not The End of the World (But You Can See It From Here), April 2020
Pristine pop from the depths of lockdown. Free to download from HAVR’s Bandcamp and available on all the usual streaming suspects. The video is on YouTube here.
Bring The Good Times Back EP, December 2019
Bring The Good Times Back‘s four songs are united by a single theme: rage.
The collection begins with the pointedly post-punk 1979, a howl of fury about generations of politicians who “sow poison instead of seeds” and “rip the heart from the state and the life from the towns”.
Carrie sings about a different kind of politics in the percussive, propulsive Loving Me Is A Political Act, where she articulates the fear that many LGBT+ people know all too well: that holding their loved one’s hand in public “will end as headlines”. The song becomes a proud, defiant love letter to the people whose “hearts are bigger than the sky.” It’s followed by the outsider anthem Battlecry, a rallying cry for the marginalised: “back us into a corner and we fight back.”
The collection ends with the devastating 72. Over haunting e-bow and rumbling bass Carrie skewers the officials responsible for the Grenfell Tower fire.
Didn’t Kiss You This Christmas EP, December 2019
Singer Carrie set herself a challenge for this one: write a Christmas EP that didn’t suck. This is the result.
Opener Didn’t Kiss You This Christmas dances through puddles under Christmas lights, while the mournful Christmas In Calton is a song of sadness and separation.
In the closing A Christmas Prayer, Carrie sings of the lost and the lonely and “the ones that didn’t make it through”.
Some People Are Inconvenient EP, August 2019
Here’s what the nice people at Is This Music had to say about our debut, Some People Are Inconvenient.
‘Safe Space’ is an emotionally-charged, enormodome-ready epic, its searing guitars and soaring vocals a match for the rock behemoths that regularly fill our sporting arenas (dare we say U2 in these enlightened times?)
However, as the trio’s biog says, they’re “having too much fun to stick to a single genre.”
Thus, opener ‘Voodoo’s choppy grunge would be more at home in a sweaty club, while ‘A Moment of Clarity’s spidery guitar takes towards the post-rock realm, except with a swelling, chest-beating chorus, and with ‘Bonesaw’ we’re briefly, for a breathless two minutes, back in a basement where Bob Mould wields an axe and Stadium* the industrial machinery.