Cult favorites and longtime fixtures of the Bay Area and Austin indie rock scenes, The Heavenly States return with a song that feels less like a single and more like a séance. Their new track, “My Sloop” (out September 3 via LBM Recordings), begins as a hushed, mournful ballad before spiraling into something larger, darker, and defiantly theatrical.
Where last month’s single “Fifth of July” burned with New Wave urgency, “My Sloop” trades that electric pulse for expansiveness. Over six minutes, the track unfolds like a fever dream—part dirge, part Russian classical composition, part lounge act slipping into chaos, and part musical theater in the shadow of Bernstein. What emerges is a reckoning, a dramatic cry from beyond: supernatural beings weighing the failures of humanity and asking whether we’ve mistaken detachment for strength.
The band frames it starkly:
“Let us insist on the responsibility of each human to hold it down for all the living… Humans (even the ones pretending to be post-human) shall not be permitted to walk off the job and settle down to a feast of caviar and video games. The human is deeply indebted. And worse, we are fully capable of paying our debt, yet choose not to. Only the worst parts of the human are bearing fruit – the best in us waits, fading in sun-shocked fields. The faeries have had enough. This is a song from outside us, about us, trying to get free of us.”
It’s this balance—mythic in scope, intimate in execution—that has made The Heavenly States one of America’s most fearless underground bands for over two decades. Formed in Oakland in 2002 and now split between Austin and Atlanta, the group is helmed by core songwriters Genevieve Gagon (keys, violin, vocals) and Ted Nesseth (guitar, vocals), alongside a lineup of Austin heavy-hitters: John Olrech and Erik Grostic on bass, Danny Piccuirro and Jason Toll on drums.
The new material was forged in transition—written and pieced together during COVID lockdowns in makeshift home studios, with instruments and even recording gear built from scratch. That DIY urgency is stitched into the music itself, which carries both the scars and the vitality of a band who’ve lived through eras of transformation in Austin, Oakland, and beyond.
Across their career, The Heavenly States have been compared to Pavement and The Replacements, praised by outlets from Alternative Press to Pop Matters, and hailed by KUTX as “one of America’s fearless music outfits, flying the flag for self-determination and intelligent, energetic rock ’n’ roll.” Their songs have always carried bruised idealism and coded political charge—sometimes gentle, often furious, always elemental.
With “My Sloop,” The Heavenly States channel all of this history into something bracing and beautiful: a song that sounds like a warning, a plea, and a prophecy at once.
✨ “My Sloop” is out September 3 via LBM Recordings. Watch the video and stream the single now.
