Crammed between the jagged peaks of Candy’s new album Heaven Is Here is a strange, disguised tenderness. The shapeshifting hardcore band tends to all of the mandatory themes of heavy music on its sophomore LP: It paints humanity as a colony of parasites, skewers piety, and takes aim at the rich. But the group’s most interesting songs are the ones that deviate from the sonic and thematic tropes of the genre. With the help of co-producer Arthur Rizk, who has honed records by Power Trip and Pissed Jeans, Candy defile hardcore’s typical structures with elements of industrial techno and noise. While their spewed condemnations of society feel expected, Candy occasionally wade into the muck of lust. It is their love songs that feel the most extreme.
The band formed in early 2017, issuing its debut full-length, Good to Feel, the following year. The group’s members—vocalist Zak Quiram, guitarists Michael Quick and Andrew Stark, bassist Kaleb Perdue, and drummer Steve DiGenio—are scattered along the East and West coasts. Candy seem deeply uninterested in being confined, whether to a single coordinate on a map or to a standardized sound. “I want to play music that’s interesting to people who might love Youth of Today and might also love My Bloody Valentine or the Stone Roses,” Quiram said in an interview following the release of Good to Feel, an album that ended with a surprising bit of shoegaze bubblegum.
Candy fancy themselves genre agnostics. Heaven Is Here still leans on quintessential elements of metal and hardcore—big, ripping guitar and bludgeoned drums—but exciting things happen when they contaminate the Petri dish. “Human Condition Above Human Opinion” crackles awake with static and robotic sputtering before Stark tears through with an assault on his floor tom. On “Mutilation,” Quiram’s raw, gristly scream morphs into a breathy echo. Beneath slabs of distortion, a high-pitched, pinpoint guitar solo squirms like an insect trapped under a glass. These details add texture and a bizarre delicacy to otherwise straightforward hardcore tracks.
Candy thrive in this jumble of gothic industrial and digitized metal. The standout, 10-minute closer “Perverse” is a snarl of processed racket: squealing feedback, jackhammer percussion, a bright cluster of notes that sound like the organ jingles that blare from baseball bleachers. It’s the album’s only instrumental, and in lieu of lyrics, Quiram’s delayed bursts of breath have a psychoacoustic effect—is he whispering “kill, kill, kill,” or are the dispatches you hear mere hallucinations? These amorphous vocalizations are often more interesting than his actual words.
The band designed the album to combat anxiety by mimicking it sonically. The dense, clamorous “Perverse” is oddly pacifying—like finding serenity in a circle pit, battered by flailing limbs. Throughout the record, Candy remind us of the physicality required to commune with hardcore music. Playing it can seem like a high-endurance sport, with effort measured in ounces of sweat. Its volume reverberates in the chest. The crowds heave and churn. But Candy take an additional interest in the human form on Heaven Is Here. Buried in the album’s superior second half are two love songs, “Transcend to Wet” and “Kinesthesia.”
Candy write love songs the way David Cronenberg might direct a romantic comedy. Both tracks exalt the sticky mechanics of sex, and the body is discussed in almost alien terms. On “Kinesthesia,” Quiram reveres the “ecstasy of flesh.” On “Transcend to Wet,” he reaches this state deep within a “wet warm hole.” Body parts are reduced to their most basic, animalistic functions on the latter: Nails scratch, teeth bite, lips spit. It is sex at its most elemental—deconstructed fucking. This approach could easily feel clinical, yet Candy’s blistering beats and Quiram’s tortured growl make their subjects feel warm and writhing. When Quiram screams “Cherish touch/Only kiss,” you can almost feel the blood percolating from his shredded vocal cords. It is sensual and radical all at once.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article contained errors regarding the band’s lineup. Kaleb Perdue plays bass, not Cody Mollen. Steve DiGenio plays drums, while Andrew Stark plays guitar. And DiGenio’s name was misspelled as “De Genco.”
