''Heaven'' is the second and final studio album by Canadian

alternative rock Alternative rock, or alt-rock, is a category of rock music that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1970s and became widely popular in the 1990s. "Alternative" refers to the genre's distinction from mainstream or commerci ...

band

Dilly Dally Dilly Dally is a Canadian grunge and alternative rock band from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

. It was released on September 14, 2018, by

Partisan Records Partisan Records is an independent record label with offices in London and Los Angeles, as well as in New York City, where the company was co-founded in 2007 by Tim Putnam and Ian Wheeler. The label, initially run out of Putnam’s South Brooklyn ...

in the United States nd United Kingdom, and by

Dine Alone Records Dine Alone Records is a Canadian and American independent record label, founded in St. Catharines and Toronto by Joel Carriere. The label is now based in Toronto, Nashville and Los Angeles. History Dine Alone was born out of founder Joel Car ...

in Canada.

Production

The album was recorded in Los Angeles, California with producer

Rob Schnapf Rob Schnapf is an American record producer and musician. He was the co-producer (along with Tom Rothrock) of Elliott Smith's albums ''Either/Or'', '' XO'' (on which he also played guitar on the song " Baby Britain"), ''Figure 8'' and ''From a ...

. The album came about during a time when the band were close to quitting, not long after their non-stop tour schedule after their debut album release in 2015.

Release

On June 26, 2018, Dilly Dally announced the release of their second studio album, along with the first single "I Feel Free". Of the single, vocalist Katie Monks said: "This song is me asking my bandmates to let go of what’s been weighing us down. We’re not going to let the past hold us back from our dreams. Let's do this thing." The second single "Sober Motel" was released on August 8, 2018. Monks explained the single "is a celebration of sobriety, in the midst of an industry that is anything but. I wrote it in a motel bathroom after taking a mystical shower alone. There was something really pure about it all." The third single "Doom" was released on September 6, 2018. The fourth single "Marijuana" was released on November 13, 2018. The title of the track came about with the legalization of marijuana in Canada, with Monks' explaining "We’ve been inhaling so much fear and hate from our televisions, our leaders, social media. I don’t know about you, but the anxiety and eventual depression became overbearing. The only way I could keep functioning, and get through writing this record, was with some assistance from weed. Basically, if I didn’t write anything good by sun down - I would smoke sativa for good measure. It would clear my creative pathways, help me forget about the expectations of others, and almost hide away in my own protective energy field."

Tour

In support of the album, the band went on tour, starting on September 7, 2018, in Minneapolis, Minnesota and finishing on November 2, 2018, at Fox Oakland Theatre in

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

. In November 2018, further announcements of the tour were announced from March 19, 2019, to April 20, 2019.

Critical reception

''Heaven'' was met with "universal acclaim" reviews from critics. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7 ...

score of 82 based on 9 reviews. Aggregator Album of the Year gave the release a 80 out of 100 based on a critical consensus of 16 reviews. Andy Johnston of '' The 405'' explained: "For an album that’s purportedly all about hope and positivity, ''Heaven'' is an almost oppressively heavy listen. The full-blooded energy and youthful, lascivious abandon of the band’s 2015 debut, Sore, is present only in trace elements, replaced by a palpably depressive, inescapably doom-laden mood, punctuated only briefly by bursts of light." Ava Muir of '' Exclaim!'' explained: "While Sore was a ferocious and sludgy monster, Heaven feels tamer—a sturdy shoulder to lean on rather than mosh your pent-up rage to. Amidst hazy guitar riffs, melodic bass tones, and the frequent swap of Katie Monks' vocals from her distinctively raspy howl to more subdued singing, Heaven manifests as its own beast entirely." The release got ranked at Number 32 on Exclaim!'s Top 50 Canadian Albums of the 2010s.

Accolades

Track listing

Personnel

Band Members * Katie Monks – guitar, vocals * Liz Ball – guitar * Jimmy Tony – bass * Benjamin Reinhartz – drums Production *

– producer, mixer * Brian Rosemeyer – engineer * Mark Chalecki – mastering * Vanessa Heins – photography

References

{{Authority control 2018 albums Partisan Records albums