MacD on Music: Head Melter

Name changes are nothing new in music. Countless groups and artists have, for a variety of reasons over the years, decided to change their name and occasionally their entire musical direction. Joy Division gave way to New Order, And And! And became The Commitments and The Hawks shed their wings and landed as The Band.

This week, I’m talking to the group formally known as White Lighter. Last year, they changed their name to Headmelt and have just released their debut album ‘Crua’ this past Friday. I caught up with the group, made up of Cormac Rogers (vocals/guitar), Tiernan Gardiner (drums) and Mark Gibson (bass), to talk about the album and the history of the band.

Cormac: “We started White Lighter in 2020 during Lockdown, just kind of out of boredom. There were five of us at the time, there were guitarists Chris Gallagher and Liam Doherty, as I wasn’t playing guitar at the time. I was originally just the vocalist and producer, recording everything because it was Lockdown, and we couldn’t play gigs.”

“From there we were practising all the time and working on songs, then Chris planned to stay home in Donegal and unfortunately Liam passed away in 2021, so we decided we’d keep going. It was the best thing to do, we thought. From there, we moved up here to Derry and we’ve been living together for four years.”

Speaking of the name change, Cormac tells me: “It was a pretty long decision. We’d thought about it for some time. The sound we had with White Lighter was more shoegaze-y, a lot softer, more indie, but it wasn’t really what we were interested in doing. People were coming to see the stuff that we’d released, and we weren’t playing that. We thought the more aggressive sounding name Headmelt suited us better.”

Speaking of the album: “It’s been a long time. We’ve been playing it live for some time and they were demos for a long time. I study music production, and I planned to produce it anyway, so we had no studios or anything, we just booked Soundworks and brought the interface down with us, also the mics, and just played live in the room for the most part and did small overdubs at home.

"I think four or five songs were done in Donegal, with a live session thing, and the recordings ended up being that good that they ended up better than we’d ever record ourselves. A lot of the rhythm tracks, the drums and the bass and some of the vocals, came from that live session.”

I mentioned to them about the rawness of the album, and Cormac said: “It’s on purpose in a way, but it’s just how they come out.”

Tiernan: “The original, when we were recording everything separately and putting it together that way, it sounded so different to what we were playing live, so it just made more sense to record a live set and that is the recording.”

Cormac: “We ended up playing them twice as fast live and twice as intense and it didn’t make sense to have the recordings sounding softer than the live stuff.”

When asked about a possible physical release: “It’s just digital for now but if we can we’ll do physical ones. We were very lucky; we were able to get a vinyl of our EP. I don’t know if we’d be able to do that again. It would be nice to do cassettes or something. There’s a huge comeback for cassettes. It’s a niche kind of market for it now. We’re big fans of bands that are the same size as us and we’d love to have a physical thing of our album. If we can get a cassette done, we’ll do it for sure.”

And that’s it from Headmelt. Their debut album ‘Crua’ is out now on all good streaming platforms and will also have a limited run of 50 cassettes available.

READ MORE: MacD on Music

Now, onto other business. This Friday sees the release of the newest single from Grim17. The track, ‘Slugger’, “details the contradictions of modern human life. This tracks hits. Hard. With Grim's northern Irish accent delivering truth bombs that shatter the illusion that we get what we pay for. But don't let appearances fool you. 'Slugger' boxes clever. Using all of his songcraft, Grim17 has produced a compelling take on modern blues that is catchy, funky yet unique.”

Finally, time for the socials. Grim17 can be found on Instagram @grim17again and Headmelt @headmelt.hm.