Seaheaven return: announce new album + release new song

2020 has been a well-documented weird year, but sometimes good things come out of strange and uncertain times. Now, here to deliver a welcomed return and surprise, Seahaven have announced their return and their signing to Pure Noise Records.

Pre-orders are available here for Halo of Hurt, and the album’s first single, “Moon,” can be heard below.

There was certainly a time when it looked like Seahaven may never make music again, and they had been quiet on social media platforms for years. But, the news today is true: their new album, Halo of Hurt, will be out on November 20th via Pure Noise Records.

Halo of Hurt is Seahaven’s first album in six years, and looks to reignite the magic of their acclaimed run of the early 2010’s. An adventurous rock album that urges listeners to face their self-doubt and inner demons to cast them away, Halo of Hurt is deeply personal for the band.

“In ‘Halo of Hurt,’ there’s some underlying anxiety from coming up short after 2014,” Seahaven lead vocalist Kyle Soto admits. “I wanted to bring it back to the beginning of the band — a revived version of our younger selves in my garage in 2009. No timelines, no pressure. No need to fit a certain mold.”

The pressure that Soto speaks of is real on every level. The sonic leap Seahaven made from 2011’s Winter Forever to 2014’s Reverie Lagoon: Music for Escapism Only turned many heads, and garnered near critical-acclaim. But as often is the case, things are not always so black and white. They were left with what felt like an impossible act to follow, and slowly shows and everything else just stopped. Fans feared that was all she wrote for Seahaven, and so did the band themselves.

“I don’t even know if I picked up a guitar for two and a half years,” shares Soto. This is a notion that all of the members of Seahaven — Soto, guitarist Cody Christian, bassist Mike DeBartolo, and drummer Eric Findlay — all share and refer to as the “dark period” in the band. They had an album’s worth of demos that they scrapped and pushed aside, and when you couple that with an ongoing record label search, they came to terms with the possibility that Reverie Lagoon would be their swan song. “We didn’t know what direction we wanted to go in. We did a summer tour in 2016 and when it was over, we thought that was the end.”

The story of their glorious return today, however, stems back to 2018 when they received an invitation to open the 10 year anniversary tour of their good friends in Man Overboard. “I was really feeling the nerves because it had been so long since we were out onstage in front of people,” Soto says. “I remember sitting with Cody in the green room and kind of tripping out. Then you hit the first chord and all of a sudden you’re back in your element.”

Things slowly but surely started moving from there, as they then booked a handful of headlining shows that closed out 2018 for them. Later, though, they were at the Pomona date of Balance and Composure’s farewell tour and met Pure Noise Records founder Jake Round. Round had been a longtime fan of the band, and wanted to play a hand in releasing a future project. “He gave us complete freedom to do whatever we wanted,” Soto says. “That’s pretty much all we needed.”

The final checkpoint for their return was when Seahaven returned to Costa Rica — where they also recorded the scrapped 2016 demos — and played a show in April of lat year to friends and family. This show finally completed the revival cycle for the entire band, and Halo of Hurt shows their energy and intrigue.

Seahaven then self-produced Halo of Hurt at Another Recording Company in Omaha, Nebraska earlier this year, mere days before the COVID-19 pandemic broke. While there is no clear path for Seahaven to perform live for fans soon, they don’t have intentions of fading away again soon.

“Our fans’ online presence has been a big reason for this whole process,” Soto says. “Fans being inquisitive, hoping and wishing: ‘Is there a new release? I thought you guys went and did a record in Costa Rica?’ They never fizzled out. We knew people still cared.”

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