CHILD Tear Into ‘Rebirth’ With ‘Damned Heart’
CHILD’s new album ‘Rebirth’ lands June 26 via Heavy Psych Sounds, and the first taste, ‘Damned Heart,’ already hints at what they’re up to without laying all the cards on the table too early.
What stands out on ‘Rebirth’ is how deliberately they step away from sheer volume as a crutch and start digging into what actually holds together when all that excess gets peeled back. The shift doesn’t creep in slowly either, it’s right there from the start, in the way the songs take their time and lean into feeling rather than just chasing impact, as if the band decided it was finally worth risking a few rough edges instead of circling back to familiar ground.
There’s a looseness to how the tracks stretch out, but it never feels self-indulgent, more like they’re giving the ideas room to unfold at their own pace, and when things do come back down, it hits with a kind of weight that feels really earned. You get the sense of a band thinking on its feet, second-guessing itself in real time, … but letting the cracks show … which ends up making this probably their most honest record so far.
The core influences are still easy to trace, that 60s and 70s heavy rock backbone is baked in too deep to disappear, but here it’s been pared down to something almost skeletal, a frame without much padding, and it suits them more than expected. There’s a bit of tension in that sparseness, like they’re resisting the urge to fill every gap, and it gives the whole album a different kind of presence.
I haven’t seen them live myself, but I keep hearing the same phrase come up, that whole “electric church” thing, like they lock into a groove so hard it stops feeling like a show and turns into something almost physical. What’s surprising is how this stripped version still taps into that, just without the overwhelming blast. It turns inward, like the tension never really breaks loose but just winds itself up and hangs in the air a bit longer than you would normally expect.
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