B-Side Guys

The guitar doesn’t arrive so much as it settles in, each note hanging in the air like dust motes caught in afternoon light. “Heavy Heart” earns its title through density rather than volume, building its emotional heft through patience and restraint until that final noisy eruption feels both inevitable and cathartic. This is Slugfeast at their most deliberate, stretching slowcore’s inherent melancholy into something almost meditative before tearing it apart.

What’s remarkable about the UC Davis trio’s approach here is how they refuse to rush toward resolution. Alejandro Magallan’s guitar work moves in long, contemplative passages that give each phrase room to breathe and decay naturally, while Claire Tauber’s bass provides a steady anchor that keeps the track from drifting into formless ambience. Lucas Wieser’s drumming understands the assignment perfectly—this isn’t about technical flash but about knowing when to hit and when to hold back, creating space for the song’s heaviness to accumulate organically.

The downtrodden quality mentioned in the band’s description never tips into wallowing. Instead, there’s a kind of clear-eyed acceptance running through the performance, the sound of people who’ve learned to sit with discomfort rather than immediately trying to fix or escape it. That’s adulthood in an eroding empire, isn’t it? Not the dramatic collapse but the slow recognition of weight, the daily practice of carrying what you can’t put down.

When the outro finally explodes into noise, it’s not chaos for chaos’s sake. It’s the logical endpoint of all that accumulated tension, the moment when restraint finally gives way to something rawer and more urgent. The fuzz doesn’t obscure the emotion—it amplifies it, turning internal pressure into external sound. Recorded by Brad Lincoln at Oakland’s Deathbed Recording, the production captures both the wooly warmth and the sharp edges, letting the distortion feel purposeful rather than decorative.

For a lead track off their self-titled debut via Cherub Dream Records, “Heavy Heart” establishes Slugfeast as a band willing to trust their instincts even when those instincts say slow down, sit with it, let the heaviness be heavy. Three years of performance and shared life between these three friends has yielded something that sounds lived-in and hard-won, the kind of track that doesn’t try to fix you but might help you feel less alone in the not-fixing.