HEAVY MOSS - DeaD SLOW - P(DOOM)

Heavy Moss formed in late 2022, when Lucas Harwood and Sam Ingles bumped into each other in their hometown of Geelong – a place they’d both recently moved back to. Years before in Melbourne, the two had played in the fuzzed-out ‘90s-inspired band Atolls. Reunited, with Harwood on keys and Ingles on drums, they began workshopping some of Harwood’s songs that didn’t quite fit with his other band, King Gizzard. Like that band, Heavy Moss found themselves mining psychedelic pop for inspiration, landing upon some references curiously missing from the Gizzard canon: Elton John, King Krule, Spacemen 3, and Drugdealer. Before long, the pair brought on Kyle Tickell on guitar and vocals (Sons et al) to expand their sound. Tickell brought along his own batch of dreampop gems, balancing out the frenetic British psych vibe of Harwood’s tunes. Bec Goring came in on bass (Merpire, Courtney Marie Andrews) to fully round out their sound.

The band quickly recorded a couple of singles in each songwriter’s mode (Summa from Tickell and Morning Milk from Harwood); happy with the dynamic and sound, they divided up songwriting duties and dug in for album sessions at Gizzard HQ, committing live takes to tape on the fly. Eight tracks emerged from these sessions. The band added overdubs in their home studios, with Harwood and Stu Mackenzie mixing half the album while on the road. The other half was mixed remotely by Michael Badger, who mixed King Gizzard’s infamous “Nonagon Infinity”

The first single ‘Star’ draws the listener in with a mellow groove, driven by Rhodes keys and fuzzy lead guitar, before opening up into five minutes of lush, melodic dreampop. The track nods to Real Estate and My Morning Jacket along the way, winding towards its cosmic instrumental outro. The accompanying music video mirrors this trajectory, with the band hatching a conspiratorial plot to make contact with two black-eyed aliens by branding their patch of earth with the shape of a star. Treadmills’, the second single, is a jangly waltz that dances through several motifs before layering on woozy psychedelia as the Flaming Lips might have done. The two tracks tease out the dynamism of Harwood and Tickell’s songwriting; Tickell lets his jangly pop envelop the listener, while Harwood’s songs are more ‘60s inflected, stitching together disparate ideas in the spirit of Elephant 6. Adding to the songwriting oeuvre is drummer Ingles’ offering ‘Melt’ - a woozy, ambling psych pop epic nodding to early naughts psychedelia of The Black Angels and Dead Meadow. They’re drawn together in a coherent whole, though, through jammy, motorik-driven outros and an ambient haze that hovers over the album’s eight tracks.