We meet Lowheaven’s Dan to talk recording in ancient churches, David Cronenberg marathons, and why uncomfortable is exactly what heavy music needs right now…
Words by Felix Bartlett | Sep 15, 2025
It’s been just over a week since Lowheaven dropped their latest album, and Dan, the band’s frontman, is still processing the whirlwind. “We had so much anxiety leading up to this because it’s been ages since everything was finished,” he admits over a video call from Toronto. “You get all this time to build up these ideas in your head, thinking everything you worked on is going to be terrible. Then it came out and it was the complete opposite.”
That anxiety seems almost quaint now, given how well the record has been received. But for Dan, there’s barely been time to sit with the success. The band has been on the road for the past couple of weeks, which meant “we didn’t get to experience sitting at home and watching it all unfold because we’re rushing off to Jersey or wherever.”
The journey to this moment has been anything but straightforward. Lowheaven emerged from the ashes of Dan’s previous band, Sparrow, during a period that coincided with the pandemic lockdowns. For someone who had been playing tons of shows every year since he was a teenager, being stuck at home was a massive adjustment. But as Dan reflects, “it gave us so much time to work on art, to focus on whatever we wanted to create.”
Those songs definitely got the full treatment. “There are tracks that got rewritten five, six, seven times,” he explains. “Sometimes that can be a bad thing, but in this case it worked because every time we rewrote something, things got darker and heavier. We kept pushing into the zones we really needed to explore.”
The setting where they recorded the album couldn’t have been more perfect for that darker direction. The band holed up in Barbershop Studios, a converted centuries-old church, where they essentially lived during the recording process. “We were the only people in there,” Dan recalls. “At night we’d all separate – I’d be sleeping in the downstairs lounge while everyone else was two floors up.”
But here’s where things get interesting. The band had horror films playing constantly in the background while they worked. “Lots of David Cronenberg,” Dan grins when asked about the selection. “There was this movie – I can never pronounce it right, but I think it’s Titane. That film is absolutely wild and completely messed up.”
The films weren’t exactly foreground viewing. “They’d be on quietly, below whatever we were recording. But you’d look up at 11 pm and see a body getting chopped into pieces, and you’d just think, ‘okay, cool, that’s our vibe right now.’”
This whole setup fed into the band’s mission statement for the record. “One of our key words was ‘uncomfortable,’” Dan explains. “We didn’t want wrong notes, but we wanted things that felt like they could be wrong notes. That tension was important to us.”
If you’ve dived into the record then you’ll know the lyrics pair perfectly with the unsettling sonic landscape. Dan’s process involves starting with phonetic placeholder lyrics during the demo phase, but this time around, he pushed himself harder. “After about four days in the studio, I realised what I had wasn’t good enough. I needed to go back and completely rewrite everything.”
He credits exhaustion as a motivator. “Recording should be fun, and it usually is, but not this time. We’d work all day, and maybe your only break was dinner and an hour of watching Ozark before getting back to it.”
The result is a record that Dan views as a complete piece rather than individual tracks. “Once it’s done, it’s done for me,” he says. “I see it as one whole record, not separate songs. There’s this grip to it that’s hard to let go of, so I have to step back from it to move forward.”
That said, certain songs have translated particularly well to the live setting. “Cancer Sleep” has become a crowd favourite, and Dan’s excited to work more tracks like “Violence”, “Nothing Else Frail”, and “Mad at Grace” into their sets.
The band’s sound draws from a wide range of influences, reflecting the different backgrounds of the members. “We all come from different places,” Dan explains. “Mikey and I are huge Deftones fans. I love Soundgarden. Alex is obsessed with System of a Down, which we constantly give him grief about.”
But it’s in the deeper cuts where things get interesting. Dan name-drops Cave In, Converge, and the whole New England heavy music scene, while other members lean toward bands like Buried Your Dad and Misery Signals. “When you’re trying to blend someone who loves Cave In with someone into Misery Signals, you’re going to end up somewhere unexpected.”
This eclectic approach reflects what Dan sees as a broader shift in heavy music. “In the last five or six years, you’ve started seeing this shift where people are willing to experiment more. There are varying degrees of success, but the willingness is there.”
For Lowheaven, the goal was simple: “We just wanted to invent our world. We wanted to create our own space and take what we loved from different heavy music, leave out what didn’t matter to us.” They weren’t bound by conventional genre expectations. “We were like, who cares about categories? Let’s write the best hook for each moment.”
The approach seems to be working. Dan notes that “our measure of success is that nobody describes us the same way. When you start seeing other bands getting that same treatment, existing outside traditional boxes, that’s the beautiful thing we’re after.”
Looking ahead, the band has more touring planned, with hopes of eventually making it to the UK. Dan has a personal connection there – his father is from Scotland – and it’s been a long-term goal that various circumstances have prevented. “I’ve wanted to get to the UK forever. It would be amazing if we could make it happen next year.”
For now, though, it’s all about getting the new material in front of audiences and seeing how it lands. “We want to be playing as many shows as possible. We want to give people the chance to experience what we’re doing and see if they connect with it the way we do.”
Given the early response, it seems like they’re onto something. And if you’re looking for music that’s genuinely uncomfortable in the best possible way, Lowheaven might just be exactly what you need.
Ritual Decay is out now via MNRK Heavy
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