The Heavy Heavy

With the arrival of their debut EP Life and Life Only, The Heavy Heavy immediately filled a longtime void in the musical landscape, delivering a soulful breed of rock & roll untouched by modern artifice. As audiences across the globe grew enchanted with their era-bending sound, the UK-based band began selling out headline shows in major cities like New York and Chicago, opening for the likes of Black Pumas and Band of Horses, and earning critical comparisons to Jefferson Airplane, The Band, The Mamas & The Papas, and more—all with only a handful of songs to their name, including the AAA radio top five singles “Miles and Miles” and “Go Down River.” After spending the past two years on the road and in the studio, The Heavy Heavy now draw listeners even deeper into their dreamworld with their long-awaited debut album One Of A Kind.

Written entirely by co-founders Georgie Fuller and William Turner and mostly recorded at Turner’s studio in Brighton, One Of A Kind maintains the self-contained approach of Life and Life Only—a seven-song project acclaimed by outlets like NME (who named them an essential emerging artist for 2023) and The Guardian (who noted that The Heavy Heavy “write and play music with that lick of madness that makes early Fleetwood Mac and peak Stones so thrilling”). To that end, Turner produced, engineered, and mixed every track and handled most of the LP’s lavish instrumentation (including guitar, bass, piano, organ, Mellotron, and more), with The Heavy Heavy’s live band lending their explosive energy to the album. But in a departure from the EP, One Of A Kind leans away from Laurel Canyon-esque folk-rock and fully embraces their British roots, finding a particularly crucial inspiration in the gritty and groove-heavy hedonism of the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup. “A lot of our EP was very bright and pretty, so we wanted to smash the door down like we do in the live show,” says Turner. “Because we were creating an entire album, there was so much more space to explore and expand,” Fuller adds. “It’s still undoubtedly that Heavy Heavy sound, but now we have all these other rooms to play around in.”

Because of the rapturous response to their debut EP, The Heavy Heavy found themselves in an unfamiliar headspace when it came to the creation of One Of A Kind. “With the EP we were making songs as a way to soundtrack our own lives, but now it’s a different beast—it’s no longer theoretical, which gives everything more weight,” says Turner. But in the end, the band discovered an essential touchstone in the connection they’ve forged with their fans over the last two years. “Not too long ago, a woman came up to us at a show and told us she was getting a tattoo of one of our lyrics to remind herself to keep pushing on and keep chasing her dreams,” Fuller says. “Moments like that always remind us that as long as we keep making what feels good, chances are it’s going to make other people feel good too. I hope this album feels like a great big party to everyone, and I hope it inspires them to live their lives however they want.”