Spotlight: The Heavy Heavy

Photo: Nicholas O’Donnell

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Setting off their seventh tour in two years, The Heavy Heavy slip into a world of their own, with long hair and flared jeans flying in a wild haze of nostalgia. The Brooklyn, N.Y. crowd that they lead back to peak psychedelia is a far cry from Malvern and Brighton, U.K., where William Turner and Georgie Fuller first found the sound of the ‘60s. For those young students of hi-fi, this American audience belting out their lyrics could only be a distant dream. Now, despite their effortless command of the spotlight, that dream is still kicking.

“If I look back at myself three years ago, none of this was happening,” Fuller says, retracing the ride that’s brought the band back to the U.S. with One of a Kind, their debut album for ATO Records. “This would have been out of my wildest dreams and almost would have hurt as an aspiration. Genuinely, my heart would have gone, ‘Don’t think about that because that won’t happen.’”

After crossing paths in London’s rock underground, Fuller and Turner formed The Heavy Heavy in 2019 to renew the vinyl classics that soundtracked their childhoods. Turner, then the lead guitarist for a surf-rock combo, heard something rare in Fuller and asked the classically trained vocalist to lend her talents to his project. “It’s very difficult to sound classic these days because the vocal timbre and techniques have changed, but Georgie’s voice hitting a tube microphone into compression and tape just sounded right,” he recalls. “We just thought, ‘Fuck, this is great.’”

Turner’s technical prowess, matched with Fuller’s voice and storytelling, made for “quite a good recipe when we got together because it meant that we could explore so much,” Fuller shares. “To finally be able to sing the way I’ve always wanted to sing, based on the singers that move me the most— Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Susan Tedeschi—it was just an absolute perfect match.”

Though they played out only twice before curtains fell for the pandemic, the artists worked through the lockdown from a shared flat. For their quarantine sessions, the new duo honed in on the sound of Golden State icons like The Byrds, Delaney & Bonnie and The Mamas & the Papas. That rose-tinted vision of the American West inspired Turner to dream up the euphoric traveling song “Miles and Miles” without leaving his room—much less the country. The pair recorded that standout and five others from home for their 2020 EP, Life and Life Only. “Honestly,” Turner says, “from then until now, we’ve just been hanging on.”

When ATO rereleased The Heavy Heavy’s self-issued EP in 2022, “Miles and Miles” proved prophetic, breaking the Top 5 on America’s AAA airplay charts and dashing the duo into a whirlwind tour. Down the road, they found themselves in California, soaking in the scenery they’d long dreamt of. “We drove up to Topanga Canyon and it felt like a time capsule,” Turner shares. “We thought it was probably as quiet and as beautiful as this 60 years ago. Somehow, that hasn’t really changed.”

Looking back, Turner describes Life and Life Only as a “very breezy love affair with the golden, kind of hazy sound of Laurel Canyon, just to sort of experiment with the possibility of even making that happen.” Fuller offers, “We feel like we’re two years ahead of what’s actually out there, so it’s almost like we’ve been waiting four or five years to get new songs out into the world.” With much more to say and an eager audience, the duo wasted no time after their near-nonstop tour before tearing into their full-length reintroduction in the fall of 2023.

One of a Kind is a definite sonic pivot for The Heavy Heavy. Recorded at Turner’s new studio in the seaside city of Brighton, the album trades Southern California’s stained-glass sunbeams for the fuzz-drenched fog of British rockers like the Small Faces, The Who and The Rolling Stones, whose 1973 opus Goats Head Soup was in heavy rotation throughout the sessions. By looking to these lifelong icons, the band bolstered their neo psychedelia with “a bombastic, louder entrance to the room, sort of kicking the door down,” Turner says.

“It was a real mix of things that fed into the boiling pot that made it happen,” the guitarist continues. “We were keen to not depart from where we’d been already, but also to add a bit of booze, if you like, into the situation. The first EP was maybe a bit sober, and by the time the album arrived, we’d started drinking,” he laughs. “That’s a good way to describe it.”

With Turner handling production, engineering, mixing and most of the instrumentation, the era-spanning alchemy across One of a Kind is meticulous. The collection veers madly from the sizzling garage-rock stomp of “Miracle Sun” to the honey-sweet harmonies of “Lovestruck” and the cello and pedal steel trance at the end of “Salina.” By baring their eclectic tastes, the pair reached beyond retro-revivalism for something richer—a total expression of their musical identities. “Our favorite records stopped being produced in the early ‘70s,” Fuller says. “And it’s just a quest to make more music that can make us feel like they do. We are in 2024, so it’s not going to sound like that—but if it can give us the same feeling, then it’s great.”

Back in Brooklyn, that feeling is infectious. As they pour themselves into transporting jams, The Heavy Heavy’s burning love for the style they’ve rekindled is palpable, and the passion they inspire—in crowds they never expected—brings new depth to the music. “It’s funny because now the whole thing is no longer theoretical,” Turner observes. “With songs like ‘Lovestruck,’ we can actually call upon personal experiences being in Mill Valley, Calif., and the feelings that we had at that moment. So it became more personal, in a way, but the dream is still alive, and it’s still real. We’re just sort of living inside it now.”