Photo credit: Joe Kirschling
Few band names are at once more apt and more misleading than Hello Death’s. Direct and unsentimental, it perfectly captures the mindset of the Milwaukee quartet’s songs, which confront the fleeting nature of existence with disquieting bluntness. But while the name does a great job broadcasting the themes that fascinate the band, it’s far less effective at conveying what the band actually sounds like, since decades of heavy metal have taught listeners to associate the word “death” with the loudest, noisiest music possible.
“It was probably naïve, but I didn’t realize how much the name would affect what genre people thought the music was,” says singer/bassist Nathaniel Heuer. “People are very surprised when they don’t know us and they ask ‘Hello Death?’ and I say we’re a vocal-centric folk band.”
On their 2013 self-titled debut album, the quartet periodically echoed the post-rock textures of their sibling band Group of the Altos, but the feel was markedly more intimate. And where Altos usually let the instruments do the talking, Hello Death build their songs around an unusual vocal triumvirate, with Heuer juxtaposing his gravedigger baritone against the soft, angelic voices of bandmates Marielle Allschwang and Erin Wolf.
The group’s new Remnants, released in May on Gloss Records, is even sparser than its predecessor, and even more driven by those distinctive vocals, but if the LP otherwise feels like it was cut from the same cloth as its predecessor, there’s good reason for that. It was recorded during the same 2013 sessions at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in Eau Claire.
“We had tons of material, so we went in with the intention of trying to get two albums,” Heuer explains. “It’s interesting because there was no master plan. Essentially, we recorded 16 songs and we were proud of every single one of them. There seemed to be a nice narrative with the songs that we picked to focus on for the first album. Then there ended up being this nice narrative for the second album, too. We did think that we would be going back into the studio to record two or three more songs to add to it, but that recording session was so great in and of itself, and felt so good to us, that we wanted to keep the room feel. Even if we had gone back to the same studio it would be with different microphones and it would sound different.”
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Albums made up of leftovers from previous sessions have a pretty bad track record, since they’re almost always padded with secondary material. But their Remnants is comprised of songs that Hello Death treasure, including some of the first they wrote together and ones that have been staples of their live set for years. “For me, ‘remnants’ implies things left behind from an event that you realize are more valuable than you thought, almost like family heirlooms,” Allschwang says. “They’re more like reminders than leftovers.”
Remnants’ release marks the start of a high-profile stretch for the band. On Aug. 11, Allschwang will release her debut solo album, Dead Not Done. Hello Death also have another album in the queue, which they recorded at a barn this spring. If all goes according to plan, they’ll release it this fall, around the time they host Prince Uncovered, an Alverno Presents performance celebrating the work of the lascivious pop star.
By their own admission, they’re not the first Milwaukee band that most would associate with Prince, but they’re admirers of his work. “It came as a surprise to people who didn’t know us but not at all as a surprise for people who do know us,” says Heuer.
The more they combed Prince’s catalogue, the more similarities the band noticed between their own approach to music and his. “I was watching this online documentary about Prince and his production style about how he would just take things out, like remove a bass line from a song,” Allschwang says. “He has no fear of the minimal or the sparse or silence or emptiness. I think he’s kind of like Hello Death, totally open to both the lushness or the sort of emptiness that can be found between different sounds or recorded elements. As I dug through the different layers of his music, I found some drone, weird tape loops and elements of minimalism. There were sounds that were dark just as much as there were super fun and playful and sexy ones. To me this was really exciting, just the different possibilities that open up.”
Remnants is streaming at glossrecords.bandcamp.com.
