Sometimes a piece of music takes me back to my days of working at my college’s radio station in the early 2010s. In my first year there, I was handed the glorious graveyard shift of 2-4 AM, left to my own devices on the ground floor of the communications building, nineteen years old and either a) hungover from the previous night’s antics, b) racing to finish an assignment I’d put off until the last moments, or c) both.
Either way, there was a strange aura in the studio during those wee hours: Ghosts whispering in the signal, phantom footsteps down the hall, the smell of old carpet and stale coffee lingering between the soundproofed walls.
Recently, those fond memories have rushed back, thanks to Heaven For Real’s new album Who Died & Made You The Dream? The Nova Scotia duo of twins Mark and J. Scott Grundy have put out a record of avant-garde indie pop that sounds like the dreamy atmosphere of the old radio station at night: Soft vocals that still slice through the air with urgency, instruments and harmonies that blend but still transmit a strange dissonance, rhythms that drive with a straightforward motion but suddenly skip a beat to break you out of the trance, before plunging you back in again.
Such a sound manifests from the first second of the album on leadoff track “Sentient Brat”, where the Grundys’ slightly off-tune “Bye-bye, where’d you go?” acts as a backbeat to jangling guitars and a wild saxophone, as well as Mark’s abstract lyrics (“All I ever tried to do was strange/I’m entirely a logo/When everything we’re gonna do is strange/But there’s still one, just one wrinkle”). Not to break up the dreamlike flow too much, the song blends directly into “A Little Bit of Space (and the Heart Starts Dancing)” where the dream is more explicitly evoked: “Helped me find a place/I think a place, yeah/Of mystic, limitless potential.”
“Unltd. Time” (short for “Unlimited Time”) begins like an echoing track from the ‘90s, playing with contradictions (“Unlimited time/for a limited time”) and self-reflection (“I’m not in a mad rush/But who am I, faced with something beautiful and true?”) Near the song’s end, it goes full shoegaze, slowing down the beat and turning the fuzz on the guitars up to 100, making the dream into a full-on hallucination of sound, a deep trip inward.
On “Super Bored”, the Grundys sing in a near-monotone, the guitar making a melody from the fine tone changes in their voices. But the lyrics are anything but boring: They drop polyphonic lines such as “Speak with your Christlike voice to the teachers” and “Simpletons weighing well below complex ounces with all balls in their air until one of us bounces.” Then on “Thundering”, the beat and guitars give grunge, although three minutes into the track, the lyrics lighten up like the sun peeking through the dark clouds (“Promise me you’ll reach right through the night/Everything is good for you at last”).
“Hold Me Back” builds a soundscape off a Lydian-mode guitar refrain with looping drums, the Grundys’ disaffected voices over echoing pads and distorted guitars, reflecting the “cycle” theme that circles throughout the song and the repeated word “relinquishment” hinting at an ending, although the main loop doesn’t let up until the end of the song cuts it off. It gives the feeling of being stuck in something mental, or a constant turning over of a memory: “I surrender to the cycle/I’m not immune to following the grapevine to the big pit”.
The theme of getting stuck returns in “No Use,” as does the guitar riff going heavy on the modal modulation: “Lots to process, I know there’s a word for it/But forgot the name, forgot the name, and forgot to go backwards/The game wasn’t right for me.” Then after “Allowance” – a one-minute instrumental of glitchy sounds and gasping synths – there’s “Improvement”, a mental breakdown of a track (which I mean as a compliment) where the Grundys’ lyrics tangle with the totally esoteric, with one line being an unfinished URL (“www.cadillacdoorsusedtomarkthegraveplots”) and the only cohesive line of thought connecting to the anxiety at the heart of the song: “I blew this, I really blew this/I mean, I did not do this/I talk less, is this improvement?”
“Common Breath” and “Sinister Gladness” round out Who Died & Made You The Dream?, with both songs exploring coming out of the dream and accepting the reality of loss. On “Common Breath”, the music breaks up in places like a cassette on its last legs, as the Grundys cap every chorus with the refrain “I’m sorry, babe/Thought it’d be different, babe”. “Sinister Gladness” follows the romantic focus of the song back into the dream, even if the Grundys can’t follow them there: “I’ll run, no focus, none/And watch her make her getaway fun/So wise to make your getaway fun/I want to make my getaway fun”.
In all of its dreamlike experimental glory, Who Died & Made You The Dream? asks us to go along with Heaven For Real on a journey deep into difficult thought, where the abstract manifests in the tiniest reverb and becomes visual and cerebral. It will allow us to face the parts of our psyche that once held our highest hopes, only for a bad trip to drag them kicking and screaming, and for our darkest fears to take their place.
I put this record on and remember staring up at the water-stained ceiling of the college radio station (WICB 91.7 FM in Ithaca, NY, if you’re curious), listening to the hum of the equipment as the music played softly through my headphones, and poring over wistful fears about what I was doing with my life.
Who Died & Made You The Dream? was released on 7 November 2025 on Mint Records and is available on vinyl, cassette, and CD, as well as on Bandcamp and all major streaming platforms. It features a cavalry of collaborators from across the Canadian indie music and entertainment scene, such as Jen Yakamovich of Troll Dolly, Laura Jeffery of Laughing, Olivia Scriven of Degrassi, and Mark Sutherland of Doohickey Cubicle.
Written by Will Sisskind
