Heading into 2020, it had been over half a decade since the quartet released its previous album. Fans feared it was all over. For Seahaven themselves, it sometimes felt that way, too.
“I don’t even know if I picked up a guitar for two and a half years,” admits frontperson Kyle Soto. Chat with the members of Seahaven — Soto, guitarist Cody Christian, bassist Mike DeBartolo, and drummer Eric Findlay — and they’ll refer to this as their “dark period,” a time in which they scrapped an album’s worth of demos, adjourned an ongoing label search, and resigned to the possibility of Reverie Lagoon riding off into the sunset as their unintended 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.”
Enter Halo of Hurt — Seahaven’s first album in six years and a riveting new chapter in their ongoing evolution. Astral and eerie, moonlit and menacing, Halo of Hurt reignites the magic dust that made Seahaven’s early 2010s run so special. It’s an adventurous rock album that urges you to grapple with your self doubt and innermost demons, then cast them into oblivion. “In Halo of Hurt, there’s some underlying anxiety from coming up short after 2014,” 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.”
