Heavy Halo
Heavy Halo is conflict: darkness vs. light, noise vs. melody, machine vs. skin and bone.
It is wide-eye idealism dragged down to the dirt by harsh reality.
Heavy Halo is a Goth-Grunge blood-pact forged in the NYC underground between McKeever and Gosteffects.
The band takes the spirit and existential angst of Alternative and Industrial and passes it through the shattered prism of the internet age, refracted and made new.
Jagged guitars and raw electronics explode over gut-rattling 808's. But at their core, Heavy Halo are melody junkies, lacing tracks with shameless hooks and McKeever's 100% unfiltered vocals.
As direct as the music is, the origin of the band is anything but straightforward...
McKeever spent years studying composition at Columbia University while playing every sweat-soaked DIY venue possible. Gosteffects was banging out weaponized techno at illegal raves across the country. Finally, the two met and immediately felt something in common: both would be dead if they didn't create music.
But Heavy Halo wouldn't come together until after McKeever went through a chaotic spiral that sent him to New Orleans, Los Angeles, a psychiatric ward, and back.
They regrouped in New York’s pandemic wasteland, holed up in Gosteffect's studio built in a former hospital. Driven by desperation and claustrophobia, clawing up the walls as they closed in, they ended up crafting the most emotional songs either had ever recorded. The resulting debut album was pure catharsis.
After releasing the self-titled LP on Negative Gain, the duo exploded onto the NYC live scene, performing relentlessly at venues like Elsewhere, LPR, and TV Eye. In just a year after putting out their 1st single they were already ranking on lists of “Hardest Working Bands in NYC” and “Unmissable New York Live Acts” as well as being covered in publications such as Alt Press, Post-Punk.com, and New Noise.
Feeling the pressure to annihilate any possibility of a sophomore slump, the band dug even deeper inward to write, record, and produce the follow up record themselves. They aimed for even further extremes, reaching towards apparent opposites: aggression & beauty, violence & romance, heaviness & melody – doubling down on their philosophy that songs need conflict to exist. This process almost broke them, but the resulting album, “Damaged Dream,” surpasses the debut in every way. The dream may be damaged but it’s not dead in the water quite yet.
Heavy Halo is getting up after life beats the shit out of you and spitting back in its face.
In all this conflict, Heavy Halo is the revenge.
