Candy is Disturbing, Disorienting, Oddly Comforting

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One of the first things I noticed about genre-defying act Candy’s latest album, Heaven is Here, was the record’s evocative cover art. Here, artist Andrew Barnes, through a painting that captures a mass of bodies in various states of unease and misery, evokes what Candy vocalist Zak Quiram describes as “a sort of purgatory space,” a place where “all types of people” go after death, “waiting to see where they will go next.”

This anxiety of not knowing what happens informs the entirety of Heaven is Here. As guitarist Michael Quick notes, the album was conceived during the “deep lockdown” of 2020. Such a moment, for Quick and indeed for many of us, was “deeply overwhelming.” As he sought to draw inspiration from this moment—or at least to craft songs that spoke to the devastating nature of this moment—Quick realized that the language of hardcore punk, the genre that the band long identified with, no longer spoke to what he was seeing unfold around him. “The extremity of hardcore,” Quick explains, “wasn’t meeting up with the level of extremity in the world.” Something else was needed.

And that something else was an aesthetic that, while still rooted in hardcore, began to draw more liberally from such genres as heavy metal, industrial and even noise. The result of such a strategy is a series of songs that capture the frightened, claustrophobic feel of the past three years. Heaven in Here is thus a confrontational album, not only due to its jarring sounds but also because it compels listeners to face what they may not want to confront. This is clear on album opener “Human Condition Above Human Opinion,” a noisy, pummeling track that feels like a direct response to the “ceremonial panic” that Quiram describes in the track’s lyrics. To Quiram, such a panic—on full display throughout much of the COVID-19 pandemic—only blinds us to “the fear that’s created to prohibit people…from speaking out and forming their own opinions.” Heaven is Here is Candy’s attempt to address such conditions: it sounds like the way the pandemic has felt.

The desire to take on such intense subject matter makes Heaven is Here a heavy, and it times pessimistic, album. Yet in two of the album’s stand-out tracks, “Transcend to Wet” and “Kinesthesia,” the band takes on topics often taboo in heavy music—love and lust—and, in the process, provide healthy doses of humanity and hope on an album that often revels in humanity’s worst traits. “Senses climax,” Quiram sings on “Kinesthesia,” “Only kiss/Cherish touch/Only kiss.” 

As Quick comments on such lyrics, “Not a ton of hardcore bands go there.” But in going there, Candy has broadened the emotional vocabulary of heavy music. It also helps that “Transcend to Wet” and “Kinesthesia” are two of the most sonically adventurous songs on the album, pushing the band’s sound in a more industrial direction. It is an exciting development for Candy, one that the band has expressed a desire to continue to explore.

This willingness to experiment reaches its apex on “Perverse,” a 10-minute noise track that closes Heaven is Here and pushes the band’s sonic evolution to its extremes. It is disturbing and disorienting, but, as the song drones on, it is also oddly comforting. Following a traumatic moment, it often helps to release all the energy and emotion connected to that moment. By the end of “Perverse,” the listener feels emotionally spent, and perhaps ready to heal.   

Candy performs Feb. 13 at Cactus Club.