Kevin Bronson on May 12th, 2020

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Before there was Pity Party (the Oakland emo band), “Pity Party” (the Melanie Martinez single) and Puddles Pity Party, there was the Pity Party, an avant-rock duo from Los Angeles active from about 2005 to ’12. They went by the names “M” and “Heisenflei” and besides making angular rock best measured in gallons of sweat, guitarist Marc Smollin and drummer Julie Edwards did cool things like organizing an annual Christmas Sweater Festival for charity, which was good for gallons of laughs.

Smollin and Edwards have now reunited under the name Heads Are Heavy, today unveiling their first single “That Sounds Okay.” Fans of the Pity Party knew to expect left-field everything from the duo, and so it remains with Heads Are Heavy’s first single, an ennui-saturated meditation with a hazy, lo-fi soundscape. The deadpan vocals — “It’s just getting through the day / that sounds okay to me / That sounds okay” — sounds like a mantra for every day the past two months.

”The only limitation for Heads Are Heavy is that there are ​zero​ limitations,” says Edwards, who, after the Pity Party split and Smollin moved to Berlin to become a restaurateur, teamed up with Lindsey Troy to form Deap Vally. “In the studio, we did whatever the fuck we wanted – trying every trick available to further scientific exploration of moods, emotions, and thoughts, to defy tropes, trends, genres, to accept music creation as a therapeutic outlet for our own cozy, personal darkness.”

Three years ago, Edwards said, she found in her garage the Pity Party’s Yamaha AW2816, a 16-track digital recorder that the duo used “as a musical journal,” she recalls. Says Smollin: “On it, we’d recorded hours of rehearsals, demos, and various random ideas, most of which we didn’t even remember recording.”

Filmmaker Guiseppe Valentino made the dystopian video for the song in Puglia.

||| Watch: The video for “That Sounds Okay”