The Sickly Hecks Are Dropping New Music All Year Long

Raymond Suny and Stevie Hartman, the duo behind the Sickly Hecks, are used to handling everything in-house, including recording and releasing their three albums since 2018. But the Denver band is taking a new approach this year.

So far, the two DIY artists dropped “Thread Through a Needle” and “On Your Break” independently, but the songs aren’t part of an upcoming album. Instead, they're planning to put out a single every six to eight weeks for the rest of the year.

“It used to be you finished up a song, EP or album and you’d be like, ‘I’ll put it out tomorrow,’” says drummer Hartman, noting that the Sickly Hecks are “being more intentional and planning things out a little more.”

He adds: "We’re just trying to evolve with the way the music industry is evolving.”

Or, getting “a little more algorithmic with it,” as vocalist and guitarist Suny puts it.

“It helps on a personal level, as well. An album is just so much work. It’s like, this is a song I wrote three years ago and recorded two years ago and now it’s finally ready to see the world,” Suny explains. “This way we can still keep the hype train rolling and always be working on something that we’re excited about.”

The founding members began crafting the offerings during the pandemic, when in-person collaboration gave way to sharing audio snippets and files via email. But that allowed the Sickly Hecks, formerly a four-piece, to operate “a lot more efficiently,” he says.

“I think the two-piece setup is providing a truer and unique vision of the music,” he continues. “I think a lot of that is from centralizing it to ourselves and having a lot more control of what’s presented to the audience.”

According to Suny, the earlier version of the band aligned more with the lo-fi garage rock of the 2010s, with some "teen angst coming through."

"A lot of those songs I wrote when I was nineteen," he says. "It was like, ‘The world sucks, and I suck.’ I feel a lot of the newer stuff, especially what’s going to be coming up in the next few months, has grown up a lot.”

The group's bandcamp page describes its music as "sad boy rock," and the Sickly Hecks have previously been compared to Bright Eyes, thanks to Suny's melancholic vocal style. But in the new songs, the duo is exploring a sonic territory where post-punk meets pop. In shaping that style, Hartman and Suny looked to such acts as Cursive, Pixies, Interpol and Porches, bands Harman describes as "more timeless influences."

“This new stuff feels a lot truer to us. It draws more from our original inspirations,” Suny says.

They’re also getting “a little bit unconventional with our songwriting and structures of songs and not wanting to be pushed in a corner too much with anything stylistically or conceptually,” Hartman adds.

The Sickly Hecks will show off their new sound at Globe Hall with the Good Life (a Nebraska indie-rock project started by Cursive frontman Tim Kasher) and California’s the New Trust on Wednesday, August 9. But “don’t go in expecting the classic rock-band setup” when the duo hits the stage, Suny says.

“We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from other acts and how they’re doing it, and breaking from the standard formula of being a rock band and rethinking how it can work as a band, how we can play shows, how we can release music,” he explains. “I think that’s also evident within the music itself, which I think dropped a lot of the more formulaic approach.”

For example, Suny and Hartman have abandoned the typical chorus-refrain style that most musicians adhere to when writing songs, and instead started naming the different elements that comprise their current output as simply Part A, Part B, Part C and so on, piecing compositions together like a melodic puzzle.

“We do a lot of starting with an idea and building on that. We would love to be a band that just does everything live in the studio,” Hartman says. But that’s never been how the Sickly Hecks go about business.

“When we first think about it, playing as a two-piece sounds limiting, but it’s really not, because we’re able to include most of our ideas that we come up with into the tracks somehow,” he adds.

That means sprinkling in some synths here and there, or a little bit of “studio magic” live, Suny says. Adding the "post" prefix to any musical genre nowadays makes conveying a band’s true nature and sound a convoluted endeavor, but when it works, it works. And that’s been the case with the Sickly Hecks, no matter what you want to call it.

“It makes it a little bit tough when people are like, ‘What kind of music do you play?' For us, I feel like, are we post-punk? Are we post-rock? Are we alternative rock?” Hartman ponders. “I’m never quite sure what to say.”

The Sickly Hecks, 7 p.m. Wednesday, August 9, Globe Hall, 4483 Logan Street. Tickets are $22.