The Head and The Heart. Photo by Shervin Lainez.

If I had to summarize Aperture, the latest album by The Head and the Heart, in exactly 52 words, then I would look no further than lyrics from “Little Room” by The White Stripes: 

Well, you’re in your little room

And you're working on something good

But if it’s really good

You're gonna need a bigger room

And when you're in the bigger room

You might not know what to do

You might have to think of how you got started

Sitting in your little room

These 52 words spell out an unspoken law of creativity, especially the sort of creativity that emerged from the DIY ethos of late-2000s Indie folk outlets. This law is really a call-and-response pattern between nascent independent projects that inexplicably strike a resonant chord in the hearts and minds of a devoted audience. This resonance spreads mostly through word-of-mouth, then through social media, then through radio waves and music charts and, before you know it, bands like The Head and the Heart (THATH) have gone from the pay-what-you-can backrooms of Seattle’s folk scene to signing with some of the biggest labels in the world. But this increase in reach comes at a price: producers. 

The Head and The Heart. Photo by Jasper Graham.

Generally speaking, producers are well-meaning people. They hear a sound that is unique and, like any decent person would, are inspired to share this sound with the world. Because they work in an industry that marches to the beat of algorithmically-derived trends, they know they will have to augment that raw and untethered sound that they were inspired by in order for it to travel further and find new audiences. It’s the seemingly ineluctable outcome that these augmentations eventually stray too far from what made it unique in the first place, and some sort of intervention is needed to rekindle that sense of originality. I think this explains why THATH decided to take back the reins of their own sound by self-producing Aperture. The band has come a long way since their “little room” release of their self-titled album, which they self-produced and self-released in June 2010. Through word of mouth alone, and before big business got involved, they were able to sell over 10,000 copies of this album via concerts and local record stores around the neighbourhood of Ballard, Seattle. Soon enough, they needed a bigger room, quite literally, as the song “Rivers and Roads” quickly made appearances in the soundtracks of shows on networks like CBS, NBC, Netflix, and Fox. That’s as close to becoming a household name as a folk band could get. 

The Head and The Heart. Photo by Jasper Graham.

Larger concert venues also mean larger recording booths that, nevertheless, become more crowded as record labels and their producers chime in on exactly how it is that THATH should sound. For his part, Matt Gervais (guitar, vocals) is quite fond of the external perspective that producers bring; yet Aperture presented a fresh sense of freedom, an opportunity to bring that “little room” ethos into the big studio sound that’s been cultivated by their last five albums. Creatively speaking, is it possible to enjoy the sense of freedom that produced your latest album without looking down at your previous output as works released under the captivity of studio contracts and their “obligations”? And is believing in this possibility equivalent to eating your freedom cake, and having it too? Gervais and Charity Rose Thielen (violin, guitar, vocals) would likely say yes to the former, and no to the latter. 

Aperture is also their first release under their own label, Every Shade of Music, with exclusive licensing to Verve Forecast. The near identical nomenclature between their record label and the title of their previous album Every Shade of Blue (released by Warner Records) is perhaps a clue that the band’s newfound creative energy is in fact a long simmering one that has been expressed in previous projects and only now finding full vindication in Aperture. Whatever the precipitating factors might have engendered a certain restlessness in the band, enough for them to want to go back to how they started, the most interesting feature of Aperture is the audacity to manufacture their own sense of necessity. The audacious willingness to get uncomfortable again, to return back to the rag and bone shop of (the head and) the heart. 

The Head and The Heart. Photos by Jasper Graham.

While necessity is the mother of all invention, reinvention is, in that sense, often an orphan. As Gervais points out in conversation with Cannopy: birthing something is painful, but rebirth is more painful. For a band with an established sound and listenership, sticking to what works is the expedient thing to do. Despite the mixed reviews that met Every Shade of Blue, that album swam in the same waters as its successful predecessors (2016’s Signs of Light debuted No.1 on the Top Rock Albums charts) and suffered more from its excesses (16 songs) than from any waning of the bands creative reserve. In other words, reinventing THATH was not a necessary project from the perspective of the industry, yet Thielen saw this retooling as the only artistic way forward for the band. From self-producing to taking their democratic approach to the next level — with different band members singing for the first time on Aperture — they chose not to rest on the laurels of their fabled Seattle come-up days, and rediscover their sounds under a new sense of necessity: what does the world need now and what do we want to give it? 

Across its 12 sub-5-minute songs, Aperture indeed spreads out as a meeting place between what our current collective moment needs the most, and what music of this sort can provide in earnest. Right from the opening “After The Setting Sun” THATH leans heavily into the stomp-and-holler anthemic sound that drove the folk revival of the early Mumford & Sons, Avett Brothers, Fleet Foxes zeitgeist. The rest of the album alternates between full-synth rallying calls and intimate acoustic sketches next to introspective word-painting. The comparisons to their breakout self-titled album are obvious and inescapable, and the fans that gathered around that first inning would feel rewarded by this return to homebase. 

The Head and The Heart, Blue Embers.

As a pseudo-throwback album, Aperture treads a tightrope, as nostalgic revisitations in music are rarely a worthwhile endeavour for a band that’s far from hanging up their instruments and coasting off their glory days. What saves this album from the pitfalls of sounding too much like the year 2010 is its utter unselfconscious sincerity. Even when they sample the gospel-lullaby “This Little Light of Mine” in “Cop Car”, it sounds more like an earnest call to optimism rather than a half-assed attempt at a summer anthem that everyone can sing along to. That is the underlying throughline across Aperture, an optimism that isn’t trying to avoid the dire straits of our present moment but looking through its dark lens in order to find bright spots. It’s also the sort of optimism that parenthood trains you to adopt — Gervais and Thielen welcomed their second child in spring of 2023 as the band was gathering in Richmond, Virginia to record Aperture. This sense of responsibility of bringing a life into a world full of bright possibilities must have carried over into an album that likewise keeps on the sunny side. 

The Head and The Heart. Photos by Jasper Graham.

It’s not all sunshine and lollipops for Aperture, there are strains throughout: painful memories of childhood in “Pool Break”, sober realizations in “Time With my Sins”, cool falsetto yearnings on “Beg, Steal, Borrow”, and a protracted exhalation on “Finally Free”. The album closes out with its title song, a percussive slow procession that lends a voice to the impulse to bring this album back to first principles: 

And I can tell your heart’s not in it

What will it take to realize

There is no end and no beginning

There’s only now, open your eyes

Someday you’ll find all you’ve left behind

And wonder why your heart’s not in it

It's not too late for you and I.

Aperture is an interesting word, one that we encounter mostly in conversations about photography and camera lenses. Yet it’s a word that simply describes a doorway between the past and the future, between what our eyes can see and what is yet to be seen. With Aperture, it seems THATH has decided the brightest is yet to come, the darkness be damned.