HEAVIER THAN HEAVEN

HEAVIER THAN HEAVEN

After a hiatus, beloved ’10s heroes Superheaven have returned as rock’s hot new thing. Whatever that means.

Michael Tedder

In 2022, Superheaven played one of their first shows in years. It didn’t go how they expected. Surprisingly, this was a good thing. It was the Outbreak Festival in Manchester, which is nominally a post-hardcore kind of thing, but Superheaven aren’t really hardcore. There’s a lot of things they’re not, really. But they went over better than co-frontman and guitarist Jake Clarke could ever have imagined.

“That was, at the time, the largest audience we’d ever played to,” he says, still sounding a bit awed. “And then seeing the crowd reaction...kids are moving around, they’re singing along. That whole time we’re trying to figure out how big the band was,” he says, adding that before the show, “It was just me and bassist Joe Kane, slinging merch, selling it to kids. And then we turn around, we’re sold out of merch before we can play in, like, an hour.”

This was quite an unexpected turn of events for the Doylestown, Penn., quartet, which also includes drummer Zack Robbins and cofrontman and guitarist Taylor Madison, who notes, dryly, that the band went on hiatus in 2016 because “we were on tour all the time, and it’s not like we were ever coming home with money in our pockets. So you leave for tour and you’re broke. You come home from tour and you’re broke, and you feel emotionally and physically broken,” he says. “So it just started to feel like...'I don’t know, man.’”

Well, better late than never.

Before they were Superheaven, the band then known as Daylight formed in 2008 when Madison (who says, “I’m not antisocial, but I spent the first half of my life alone, basically,” as he didn’t have siblings for many years) and Clarke met as teenagers through the local music scene, quickly bonding over a mutual love of 00s emo groups Thrice and Bayside.

The early years were tough. Kane was a full-time bassist in another group, and the first drummer was always busy. “We wanted to do more, but we couldn’t. And so it just felt like nothing was clicking,” says Clarke, a polite, soft-spoken man with shoulder-length hair. “Besides the music writing—that part always clicked.”

In 2013, Daylight released their debut, Jar, via Run for Cover Records, the Boston indie label that eventually became one of the ’10s most important incubators of underground rock bands. “We were so not in the music industry until our first LP came out,” says Madison, a bearded, sardonic, but friendly man wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt. It wouldn’t be fair to say no one noticed the album; it got a nice review from AbsolutePunk, and they were written up by Alternative Press and did pretty well on the Billboard Independent Albums chart. But the first half of the decade was a weird time for the music industry in general, and heavy rock bands specifically.

Sales were down due to piracy and the recession, and the music media, also trying to navigate social media and the decline of print, bifurcated into covering only the major pop artists or whatever the Brooklyn blogs thought was hip. (By the end of the decade, the media would largely jettison its interest in the latter.) Superheaven have been tagged with a lot of genre names, none of them fashionable at the time. Except for a few write-ups about The Emo Revival, their scene largely went unnoticed by the outside world. (It was considered a big deal when their friends in Balance and Composure got a track review in Pitchfork.)

But they didn’t care about any of that because, fortunately for them, they had Tumblr. “I think people were just sharing it that way,” says Madison. “And honestly, I thought that was the coolest thing." The early adopters who found Jar discovered a band fully in command of its sound, even if opinions differed wildly about where to put them. They played almost exclusively with hardcore bands in their early days, but they never really felt that label fit, nor did emo. “I mean, I think our band is very melodyconscious,” says Madison. “I hesitate to call emo a scene because it describes 80 different genres at this point.”

They’re also been lumped in with the shoegaze revival, “a term that has just totally changed its meaning in the last 10 years,” Madison says. “I wasn’t a big fan of shoegaze, honestly. I never really listened to it until people started saying that word and I was like, 'Oh, that’s what My Bloody Valentine sounds like.'" Then there’s the grunge accusations, even though you aren’t legally allowed to be associated with that scene unless you personally know Mudhoney’s Mark Arm.

“I don’t think we’re a very grungy-sounding band,” says Madison. “The genre-name thing was frustrating because we’ve always taken the stand of just like, Hey, we play rock music.’ I’ve stopped fighting that battle, and I’m just like, 'Call us whatever the fuck you want.’ But early on it was very frustrating. But we were also younger and cared a lot more about what people said."

Now, one can put on their music-critic hat and point to some seeming reference points that might be unintentional, or ponder how this band was the product of a younger, internet-bred rock music scene where sounds and artists that were once walled off from one another could now exist in the same space and kids saw no reason not to treat Alice in Chains, Deftones, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Slowdive as equally worthy blueprints that would sound even better stacked on top of each other. But let’s just say this: Superheaven are a band that is very good at marrying slow-boiling rhythms to heavy, walloping riffs that wash over you like wet cement, with crystalline melodies on top to lull you in, beefed up with some righteous screaming from time to time. So no matter what scene you find yourself pledging allegiance to, people eventually found something to like in Superheaven.

“I ACTUALLY CAN BE SORT OF A DICKHEAD. SO CAN OUR BASS PLAYER, JOE. JAKE AND ZACK ARE ACTUALLY QUITE POLITE.” —TAYLOR MADISON

Even before they released their first album, they were aware that there was a Spanish band who had copyrighted the name Daylight, which eventually bit them in the ass. “I think there’s a common misconception that we got sued. We didn’t,” says Madison. “There was no legal stuff, but no label would sign us knowing that there was a looming legal threat to change our name.”

They became Superheaven in early 2014 and reissued Jar with their new name, right after finishing an opening run for Bayside, their first major U.S. tour. “There were contracts and set times on that run of shows. It was like an actual show,” says Madison. “And then it's like, ‘Now we’re changing the name.’ So I’m sure there’s a lot of confusion there.

“And yeah, people did not like it,” he adds. “People really did not like it.”

In 2015, they released Ours Is Chrome, which again didn’t receive much attention outside their scene and didn’t push them forward like they wanted, and might have even flown under the radar of fans unaware of the moniker switch-up. “You always want to put out the second LP and you want your band to grow. But I felt like we set ourselves back. We did a headline tour off the record and it did decent. I don’t know, there’s like a hundred people there some nights. But it’s hard when your peers are doing the big rooms—you can’t help but get a little down-and-out on that,” remembers Clarke. “You want that tour to spark something else. But I just feel like the spark kind of fizzled out."

Madison says that, owing to his childhood isolation, he could be standoffish by nature back then. Or, to be less polite, “I actually can be sort of a dickhead. And to be fair, so can our bass player, Joe. Jake and Zack are actually quite polite,” he says, adding that as they’ve gotten older, he and his bandmates have learned not to push each other’s buttons. In 2016, Superheaven went on an extended break, playing shows every so often while the band members did the adult thing of marriage and children (“When approaching 30, whether you like it or not, a clock starts ticking,” says Madison) and pursuing new projects, such as Madison and Clarke’s band Webbed Wing.

Superheaven reemerged from the pandemic with plans to do a tour behind the 10-year anniversary of Jar and to hit some festivals, and discovered that something funny happened while they were gone. Namely, after years of lagging behind other genres, rock music finally started finding traction on streaming services, due to a growing nostalgia for ’90s and '00 rock and the genre-busting success of Turnstile. “I do credit them for borderline single-handedly making rock music cool again,” says Madison, sounding grateful. “Touring with rap musicians.. .they made rock music exciting and appealing to a generation of people who were kind of just unaware of it entirely.”

And perhaps even more important, for reasons only the algorithm understands but that can be at least partly attributed to getting the grunge tag and Gen Z developing a nostalgia for a ’90s they felt they missed out on, their Jar deep cut “Youngest Daughter” became a viral TikTok hit and was later sampled by the rapper Yeat. “Things start popping up on the internet; people either finding out about Jar or being like, ‘Oh, I forgot this band exists.’ Or, ‘I thought this band was Daylight.’ So they rediscovered the band. So that was in the summer of 2023 where [we went] from 150,000 monthly listeners to 200,000. And then it went to, like, half a million.”

While a popularity boom is the sort of thing most bands dream of, Madison admits he has mixed, contradictory feelings about this sort of thing. “We just got a gold record. And that’s a cool thing to say to my parents. And outside of that, I’m borderline embarrassed by it,” he says. “I definitely want attention. I think you don’t become a musician without any desire to get some form of attention. And I was alone so much when I was younger, definitely less so now, but throughout my life, I’ve definitely felt like, ‘Hey, look at me.’ But at the same time, I definitely have the kind of thing where I’m like, Hey, look at me,’ and once people look, I’m like, ‘Ah, shit.'"

But once again, Superheaven found themselves getting tagged with a label they never asked for: TikTok band. “I’m Grandpa. I truly am not tapped in with TikTok. I don’t understand why it works the way that it does and why certain bands and certain songs hit,” says Madison. “There is some level of, like, ‘We didn’t really do anything.’ I’m sure there’s other bands talking shit that are like, ‘I wish I could get a TikTok meme song’ or something like that. And it’s just like, ‘Hey, motherfucker, write a good song and maybe you will.’

“That’s kind of where I stand on it. Listen, man, the song is good. I don’t even think that’s our best song. Our band is capable of writing totally good songs, and I think that’s our strong suit. That, oddly, ended up being our gateway into becoming an active band again and being able to play in front of more people who want to hear it. But it’s not like that’s our only song. We don’t play that song and then people leave. We really don’t lean into the viralness of that one song. We don’t even close with the song."

They’ll have plenty of songs to choose from to close the sets on their first headlining American tour in years, in support of their new self-titled album, which the band coproduced with longtime ally Will Yip. Superheaven finds them taking ownership of their sound, delivering their most bludgeoning riffs and making their melodies shimmer like never before, a perfect reintroduction for an era where they’ve finally found a place where they fit.

“We were just like, ‘This moment will not last forever.’ It’s not like the TikTok thing happened and we were like, 'We gotta get a record out.’ We already had the plan to do a record and the timing worked out,” Madison says, also noting that the band gets along better than ever these days. “We’re like, Damn, we might have more eyes on this record than we thought.’ The whole time we were just like, ‘Let’s just make it good, man.’ We don’t really have any concrete expectations of what our band’s going to do after the record comes out or in the next year or two. Let’s try to just put out good songs and then, who knows, maybe in another 10 years another song will go viral."

Part of success has to do with talent, skill, and hard work. The other part has to do with luck and timing. The exact proportion between these two halves will always vary widely per success case and is ultimately unknowable. Superheaven have gotten better at what they do, but they have not fundamentally changed. They simply started in an era where people didn’t know how to discover them, or even know what to do with such an unfashionable band. A decade later the context all changed, and now they are a veteran band that gets to act like a fresh-faced buzz band, both grateful for the opportunity and eager to demonstrate that they deserve their long-overdue success.

“That’s kind of been the motif of the band: a little late to the game or a little unlucky. We’ve eaten shit a lot. So it does feel like a nice little win,” says Clarke. “We’ve worked so hard to deliver on this, so I’m up for the challenge. I’m ready for it.”