Heights
Post hardcore band Heights are back and better than ever with their brand new album Old Lies for Old Lives. Originally a five-piece from Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, they formed in 2009 and rose to fame after their first album Dead Ends was a roaring success. It was the first album of 2011 to be awarded the 5 K rating from Kerrang! and received 8/10 from both Rocksound and Metal Hammer magazine.
Recently the band have been on a tour of Europe, Australia and the UK with the likes of Architects, While She Sleeps, Born From Pain, Deaf Havana and Your Demise. Their new single, Eleven Eyes features the lead singer from Architects, Sam Carter and is the first single from their new album Old Lies for Old Lives released on 29th April.
We spoke to lead singer Alex Monty about the band’s influences, collaborating with Sam Carter and stepping up as lead vocalist after Thomas Debaere’s dramatic departure.
Let’s start at the beginning, how long have you all known each other?
“Quite a long time, I’ve known Green and Hutton since I was about 13 or 14, I went to the same school as them, I was in the year below them. And I met Dean, I actually met Dean through a mutual friend of mine again in school we were about 15 when we first met. So yeah, we’ve all known each other for a really, really long time and we all live in the same town together.”
Where did the name ‘Heights’ come from?
“A mate of ours, it’s actually the guy that’s on the cover of our first album, and he came up with the name. Originally the name was going to be ‘Climb These Heights’ it was a long sort-of name, and he was like ‘How about just Heights? It’s snappier and much better.' It just sort of came like that. It doesn’t have a cool story behind it or anything!”
What inspired you to become a musician?
I think bands that generally blow-up and explode tend to have quite fickle fan bases who are just sort of into them because they’re cool.
“Quite a lot of things, I started playing piano when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I remember when I was a kid, this kid that was a couple of years above me at school who I really looked up to and he played the piano, he had like piano lessons and stuff, so I was like that’s really cool, I really wanna do that. So I stared playing piano until I was 11 or 12 and then I started playing drums, basically because all of my other friends played guitar and we wanted to start a band together and no one knew a drummer, so I was like ‘Yeah, I’ll start playing drums’. I started teaching myself guitar and basically I started playing base when I joined Heights just because they had no bassist and I could play guitar.”
How did you get your lucky break?
“I wouldn’t say we’ve had a lucky break up ‘til now. I guess I think everything we’ve done up to this point has been quite a progression of things, you know, like we’ve moved from one point to another in quite a slow progressive fashion. Which I think is cool, you know, I think bands that generally blow-up and explode tend to have quite fickle fan bases who are just sort of into them because they’re cool. I think if you slowly build over time and you have a loyal fan base, I think that’s much cooler, you know, you can really build on something then.”
What is your day to day like?
“Day-to-day at the moment is mostly this, mostly doing interviews and press and stuff ‘cause we’ve got an album coming out at the end of next month, so at the moment for me especially because I’m doing all our press, it’s a lot of talking on the phone and stuff. But I mean it depends, sometimes you’re on tour so every day you wake up, you get in a van, you go to a show, you sleep at someone’s house and you do that over and over again in the UK, Europe, Australia, where ever we are it’ll be like that every day. When we were writing our album it was just waking up every day going to the home studio we have at our drummer’s house and just playing every day and writing until 2 o’clock in the morning then going home and going to sleep. It just sort of depends what area you’re in with the band.”
What is the song writing process like as a band?
“The song writing process is quite creative experience, every band works differently. For us, usually our guitarist Dean writes most of our music and he comes to me with an idea, usually a musical idea or a lyrical idea and be like ‘Yeah, I’ve got this, let’s work on it together’, and then we’ll work on it together at his house and then take a whole formed idea to the studio at our drummers house and he’ll put some drums to it and stuff and then me and Dean again will write lyrics together and put lyrics over it at the end. So, it involves most of the band which is cool.”
Who are you biggest influences when writing your music?
“I think it’s quite important not to get too bogged down on who you’re influenced by, obviously it’s cool to listen to loads of different sorts of music but I think it’s good to never sit down and go ‘Yeah, let’s make this part really like that band’ or whatever because it’ll be really obvious you know, especially if it’s something contemporary, you’ll just sort of end up copying them way too much. I mean a lot of what we listen too as writers, me and Dean especially will listen to a lot of older sort of music, I’m influenced by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and stuff like that so it’s obviously a lot different to what we play. Dean has big influences from bands like The Bad Seeds and stuff like that, it’s cool to have a wide range of influences for sure.”
You made ‘These Streets’ and ‘Gold Coast’ available for free download last year, why?
“We put Dead Ends our first album out in summer 2011 and our second album isn’t out for another month so we sort of wanted to bridge the gap, smooth the transition. Obviously our music has changed a little bit, I mean Gold Coast is the first song we did sort of based around clean guitars, like ever, so it was cool to be able to introduce stuff like that and different styles and stuff and then when this album comes out hopefully it’ll be a more progressive sort of change and people will be able to see the way we went with that. As for being free, I think we just thought it’s only two songs and I don’t think that anyone’s going to pay like two quid or whatever for two songs, it’s kind of pointless. Especially when most people are just going to download it and stuff, we were just like ‘Fuck it, let’s just give it out for free’ and then we can really like spread the message and stuff which would be cool.”
Do you have any plans to do it again?
“Free stuff, I don’t know really, our single that’s out at the moment is Eleven Eyes which you can download that for free if you pre-order our album. We do stuff like that quite a lot now, so I guess it’s not really free because you have to pre-order the album but it’s just a little bonus on top. But I’m always up for trying to do as many free releases and stuff as we can, because especially nowadays with the internet people are going to find a way of getting music for free anyway so I think if you just give out the best quality music for free in the first place I think more people are going to get into your band, and I’m always encouraging of that of course.”
Thomas Debaere’s departure and you taking over as lead singer must have been a hard decision for the band, how was the transition for you?
“You know, it’s quite a difficult one. Obviously when you’re a vocalist there’s quite a lot of pressure on you, loads of stuff really, you’re the person people hear first and look at most and stuff. When Thom left in the beginning of May 2012 at that point when I became vocalist I hadn’t ever recorded vocals outside of like about 5 minutes on backing vocals for These Streets. I’d never even held a mic and stood at the front of a stage or even at rehearsals, never done anything like that, and by the end of June, so only two months later I had a whole album and we’d played at Ghostfest main stage, we played Garage supporting Architects which sold out. So it was two months which is a massive learning curve, you know, I really, really got thrown in there it was pretty stressful those two months and stuff. We recorded out whole album over that period as well which was a pretty crazy time, but I’m glad we did it and I’m glad I stepped up to it and made the effort, I’m really proud of what we did at that time. I don’t regret it at all, for sure.”
Moving onto the new album, how do the new songs differ from your older material?
“I think for most people it is a different state, obviously it’s my voice on it which makes it a lot different but I mean in parts it’s still like really heavy I think, there’s tracks like Eleven Eyes and Forth/Here which is the last song on the album, so you still see the heavy stuff, it’s just like Dead Ends but better in my opinion. But then there’s tracks like Wake up, Fall Asleep and other things on there that are a lot softer, you know, there’s a lot of singing and stuff on there. But I don’t think anyone should be scared of it, Heights has always been a progressive and experimental band and at the end of the day it’s still the same people that are writing the music, its different vocals on it but all the music’s still written by the same people. So I think it will be interesting for most people to hear to notice the differences but they’re all pretty obvious.”
Which song on the new album represents the album as a whole?
“I have to say The Noble Lie which is our next single, it’s got all the drops and stuff that we wanted you know, and Dead Ends was quite flat, it was heavy and it was just heavy from beginning to end so there wasn’t a lot of dynamic drops on it and that’s something we really wanted to introduce a lot of this album and The Noble Lie has loads of that and loads of different vocal styles, there’s screaming and there’s singing and they’ve sort of been remixed together. And lyrically it sort of encompasses the message quite a lot in the lyrics.”
Which song is your favourite?
“The Noble Lie for sure! Yeah, definitely.”
The first single from the album ‘Eleven Eyes’ features Architects lead singer Sam Carter, what was it like collaborating with him?
“It was cool, we toured with Architects guys back in December 2011, was the first time we toured with them, and sort of got to know them through that. It was only a short tour but we got to know them quite well and Sam’s awesome, they’re all great guys though, they’ve all been really supportive of us especially over our vocalist change and especially over our new album. They took us out to Europe late last year as well so it’s always great to be able to do anything with those guys but especially that vocal, Sam’s not a show up, do his thing and fuck off sort of guy you know, he came and did the video for us and when he came and did the studio stuff he didn’t really want us to just be give him a part and sing it, he wanted to get our input and really be creative about it and really experiment with it together. It was awesome, it was really great.”
You’ve recently been on tour across Europe, Australia and the UK, where was the best place to play live?
“Our last tour was with Your Demise which was a UK one and we did a show in Manchester which was obscene, and a guy called Dave Morris who puts on shows up there who’s a great guy and puts on really amazing shows and the whole show was just like a stage invasion, as soon as we came on, the first note and there was literally no stage it was just a crowd and band all sort of as one the whole show. That was amazing.”
What are the bands plans for the year ahead? Do you have any upcoming shows or tours?
“We’re hitting the festival season quite a lot this summer, we’re doing Fury Fest, Slam Dunk, Hevy, Summer Jam, Burn Out, Flow Fest, like a bunch of things and we’ve got a few more to announce, that won’t be too far away. And then hopefully at the end of the year we’ll be doing a headline, maybe going back to Europe at some point.”
And finally, what advice do you have for anyone wanting to get into the music industry?
“Work hard. Write an album, it’s quite important. I mean, Heights did it and it is a good thing to do to put out an EP at first, you know to put out singles and EP’s and stuff but I think a lot of people, especially the Press and media don’t really take you seriously until you have an album coming out. I mean we wouldn’t be having this conversation we’re having now, we wouldn’t be talking now if we didn’t have an album coming out you know! So I think it’s really important to make sure you get an album out and people will take you a lot more seriously. You’ll find that people’s attitudes towards you become a lot more serious, ‘cause you know bands that aren’t in it for the long haul don’t write albums and bands that do are there and they’re established. That would be my biggest piece of advice, definitely. Write an album, get one out.”
Old Lies for Old Lives released on 29th April.
By Sophie Atherton @SophAthers