Courtesy BleakHeart
Audio By Carbonatix
It’s an old adage Denver doomgazers BleakHeart continue to put into practice with crushingly heavy results, especially on the group’s upcoming third album, “A Stone Thrown to Silence.”
The new LP — recorded locally at World Famous Studios with Pete de Boer and coming out Friday, July 10 — is a masterclass in the brooding minimal metal BleakHeart does so well by shifting the weight between the audible and liminal.
“It definitely felt more authentic for us to be more sparse and simple, intentionally leave some more space in between,” explains vocalist Kiki GaNun.
Woe and its many mutations is no familiar to GaNun, who muses here lifelong struggles with chronic pain into equally devastating lyrics.
“The themes are similar to what we’ve always written about,” she says. “We’ve leaned even more into grief and loss and surrender, and how there’s really no resolution and we’re kind of okay with that. The songwriting, at least, and the lyrical content really shows that we’re okay with being in that uncomfortable, dissonant kind of space and we’re just leaving that be.”
There is a calmness in her voice, as she outlines the space BleakHeart occupies and its growing comfort amid that chaos. The backbone’s always been there. On 2024 sophomore album “Silver Pulse,” GaNun admits to working through and processing her medical journey.
“That was more or less about my experience with being disabled and getting sicker,” she shares. “That was this medicalized process that I was going through for the last ten years. It’s very similar to grief and loss. You just move along with it. There’s no fixing it. It’s not really going to get better. There’s no cure. Maybe it softens as life moves along, but for the most part, it’s hanging out like a shadow.”
With a “A Stone Thrown to Silence,” she takes aim at the ripple effects of that and everyday life, how each action and decision comes with its own consequences — good, bad, indifferent — that must be faced and accepted.
“This record is definitely more in my bones,” GaNun admits. “It’s not really about being sick anymore. It’s more about this expanding experience that one little thing can happen, like a stone thrown to silence, that has this really expansive effect and impact on your life.
“Some of it is this loneliness and grief and being sick, and some of it is about separating from my husband and getting divorced, so coinciding with this big life change and also still experiencing what my body does,” she continues. “It really can elicit a big loneliness that’s kind of hard to describe sometimes, but it’s so visceral. It’s really in my cells.”
It hits right in the feels, too. For “Holding on to Nothing,” BleakHeart recruited Colorado heaven metal musician Midwife, aka Madeline Johnston, to create a call-and-response cameo.
“The intention of the song is a conversation between two different parts of me — past lives, future lives — and loneliness being thread through all of those,” GaNun says. “Madeline’s sound through Midwife is just perfect for that kind of loneliness. Everything about her is ideal for that as that secondary voice.
The conversational guitars of JP Damron and Mark Chronister, paired with the understated-yet-prescient drums of Garrett Jones, gives BleakHeart’s melancholy melody, especially on tracks “Eye Glass” and “Fades Like Rain.”
Courtesy Cameron Baczkowski
“We bounce back and forth off of each other,” Chronister says. He likes to call his and Damron’s connection a “call and response” partnership. “We complement each other. It’s the magic of our back-and-forth guitar playing, and it just started from the beginning really naturally.”
GaNun agrees, sharing her perspective of the dynamic doom duo.
“I’m always in the room but I’m not always an active participant in the very beginning of the process,” she starts. “It is a little magical to watch the two of them go back and forth. It is really conversational. It fits in really well. I get a big sense of warmth when they start playing off each other. It gets exciting when they are just riffing back and forth with each other.”
You can hear it all on “A Stone Thrown to Silence,” but the next opportunity to experience BleakHeart in the flesh is Friday, July 10, at hi-dive. The local release show also includes Spiritual Poison, Mournful Ruin and El Welk.
BleakHeart knows how to hypnotize a crowd and welcomes everyone to participate and interact with freshest five songs in whichever way feels right for them.
“It’s fun to watch our audience lock in the second we hit the first note and stay in this headspace and you just see people go on this journey with us,” Chronister says.
“Our hope is that it is also about collective grief and communal mourning where we know, it’s really about a larger experience about being so lonely in this world because it’s so harsh and so violent,” GaNun adds. “Our hope is that this feels raw and expressive for other people, too. Sharing this in this communal way it can give other people some type of expression or way to release the valve a little bit.”
The doom and gloom is what does it for GaNun & Co., but it’s not totally despondent and hopeless. Quite the opposite.
“It’s what comes out of me. Part of the reason why is because darkness, sadness, grief and loss are all experiences like any others — joy, happiness, excitement. It’s just as big as any other feeling. I think without that darkness, we don’t get to experience the light, we don’t know what big joy and love feels like without also knowing what hardship feels like,” GaNun explains. “They’re one in the same, in a way. There’s also something about facing it that feels really important to me. There was a long time where I would try to deny that part of me because it’s not always received or perceived as the prettiest emotion or easiest expression,” she continues. “I think now I just face it. I’m not scared of those shadows anymore. It feels more authentic and really important to just identify the darkness.”
Chronister echoes a similar sentiment.
“It just is inherently something that’s been my outlet. This is naturally where those feelings resonate, come out and our expressive,” he says.
With BleakHeart, it’s less an agreed upon definition and more a shared intuition.
“You can’t go back,” as Chronister sees it. “Once you open the floodgate, you can’t go back.”
“You can’t unsee or unfeel it,” GaNun concludes.
BleakHeart, with Spiritual Poison, Mournful Ruin and El Welk, 7 p.m. Friday, July 10, hi-dive, 7 South Broadway. Tickets are $19.
