Nobody asked for an album that sounds like cities emptying out, but HEADS. delivered one anyway. Push came out on 29 May 2020, in the middle of a pandemic spring, and whether the timing was coincidence or prophecy hardly matters, the record fits the moment like something planned. The Nürnberg trio, now with Nic Stockmann on drums replacing Peter Voigtmann, recorded it across two Berlin studios before Magnus Lindberg mixed and mastered it in Stockholm. The result is their tightest, angriest, most unforgiving record yet.
“Empty Towns” opens with something unexpected: lap steel from Kristof Hahn of Swans, a slow drawl beneath the noise that makes the song feel twice as wide as it should. Two minutes and thirteen seconds later it’s gone, but the mood it established, desolate, wide open, slightly wrong, hangs over everything that follows. “Weather Beaten” arrives with more urgency, Ed Fraser’s guitar chewing through a single riff until it starts to blur, his vocals riding the edge of intelligibility in a way that reads less like punk obscurantism and more like genuine distress.
The middle run of the album is where Push earns its rating. “Loyalty” at four and a half minutes is the record’s hinge point, it brings in two additional guitarists and builds a texture that feels genuinely dense, a wall of interlocking parts that only reveals its structure if you listen closely. “Rusty Sling” is longer and slower, the album’s lone gesture toward post-metal patience, a song that takes its time accumulating weight before it decides to spend it. “Nobody Moves and Everybody Talks” is almost the inverse: punchy, short, the title itself a kind of small societal verdict delivered in three and a half minutes.
“It Was Important” introduces a synth line played by Fraser himself, small, peripheral, slightly out of place, and the effect is quietly unsettling. “A Swarming Tide” is barely a minute, more interlude than song, but it functions as a hinge between the album’s body and its tail. Then comes “Paradise” at seven minutes and forty-three seconds, the longest thing here, which earns its length by refusing to hurry. Chris Breuer’s bass locks in low while the guitars trace slow arcs overhead, and by the time the track builds into its final section, the contrast with the album’s earlier speed feels deliberate, even earned. Closer “As Your Street Gets Deserted” lasts ninety seconds and leaves the record on a note of something close to exhaustion, not collapsed, just done.
The production, as on Collider before it, prioritises impact over clarity. The guitars have the kind of low-frequency weight that fills a room rather than cutting through it, the drums crack without dominating, and Fraser’s voice sits just below the surface often enough to feel like a transmission you’re working to receive. Lindberg has worked with Cult of Luna and others in this space, and it shows: he knows exactly how much murk is useful.
HEADS. have always been a band who value compression, of mood, of language, of structure, over expansion. Push is their most compressed record, and also their most cohesive. It knows what it wants to say and says it without apology.
Standout tracks: Loyalty, Rusty Sling, Paradise
