The Saddest Landscape break down every track on their first LP in 10 years, ‘Alone With Heaven’

Screamo veterans The Saddest Landscape‘s first album in a decade, Alone with Heaven, is out today via Iodine. It features contributions from Jeremy Bolm of Touché Amoré, Evan Weiss of Into It. Over It., and Julien Baker, and each is a standout moment. You can read Andrew’s review in Notable Releases, and for an even deeper look into the album, guitarist and album co-writer Daniel Danger took us through it track by track. Read that below, and pick up our exclusive “Where Angels Ascend” vinyl variant of the album, limited to 100 copies, in the BV shop.

DANIEL DANGER’S THE SADDEST LANDSCAPE – ALONE WITH HEAVEN TRACK-BY-TRACK BREAKDOWN

Hello, I’m Daniel Danger, an illustrator and graphic artist printmaker who makes big fancy concert posters for big fancy bands, and the guitarist of The Saddest Landscape. I co-wrote Alone With Heaven with Andy Maddox and Andrew Farrell, along with a slew of collaborators over a nine year span. I consumed approximately nine thousand Diet Cokes during this process.

To clarify the way I talk about some of these songs, I’ll note there was an earlier iteration of this record that we started soon after releasing and touring for 2015’s Darkness Forgives, spending about a year of regular writing sessions and studio time throughout 2017. At the end of those sessions, our long time drummer Aaron revealed that he and his wife were expecting a child and he would be wrapping up his tenure in the band after nearly 18 years. I think we were all tired, burnt out, and the album wasn’t what and where we wanted it to be. Major change was on our doorstep; I too had a daughter soon after, then a global plague, and it was hard to focus on anything else.

A couple of years later, we revisited the project, initially deciding to do a major overhaul and eventually starting over completely. These sessions were with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago, Jack Shirley at The Atomic Garden in Oakland, and holed up in my own crude basement studio. The biggest asset in this process was simply time, we were in no hurry. We had no label, no obligations, no tours; but what we did have was years of sitting with the first iteration of a record we were no longer beholden to. Everything we loved we kept, and worked to make it even better, further leaning into the choices and the moments that resonated the strongest with us.

We recorded and listened, recorded and listened. After nearly four years of basement feedback overdubs and vocal takes, Christmas tree adjacent cello tracking, butting heads, and Bueno Y Sano quesadillas, we finished a completely new and infinitely stronger Alone With Heaven, which is out now on Iodine Recordings.

1. “The Hell I Know”

This was written for the Albini sessions. Everyone knew instantly that the energy of the galloping opening chords meant it had potential to be an album opener. However, it took a moment of restraint years later, that once the full band kicked in we would give the song a few moments to sit in that runaway train feeling before the vocals re-joined, to make it truly work. My favorite part of this song as a Sonic Youth worshipping guitarist, is that for the entire back half of the song I’m just violently punching my guitar and railing on the whammy bar while tossing in random little arpeggio sprinkles pulled from a completely different song on the album. If you listen closely, you can hear Steve.

2. “From Home They Run”

When we went to Jack’s, we had an extremely tight week and would be recording live to 2″ tape in full takes. Moe Watson, who has been playing drums with us since 2021 and also plays with Shai Hulud and Blood Vulture, is an absolute monster, consummate professional, and came into Atomic Garden unbelievably roaring and ready to go. We were well-rehearsed and I recall doing maybe two or three takes of this song at most. The bridge is just two straight minutes of pulsing drums, creaking metallic sounds from my borderline microphonic Jaguar pickups, and Jeremy’s cello scraping over this hyper-repetitious simple guitar part; it all basically sounds like a dark wet basement. We already knew we were making a long record and weren’t afraid to stay in that place longer than maybe we should have. Andy repeating “so safe inside the dark” the whole time. Same with the ending, we lock in and just stay there. This song is front to back headbanging and such blast to play.

3. “A Badge Of Sorrow”

Andy is an album guy, he’s very conscious of the big picture; how the listener is going to sit with a record for its duration, how the vinyl sides work individually and the larger narrative. There was a conversation early on writing the album where we wanted to create meaningful pockets of rest, interludes that would assist the songs around them, and focus the listener on certain melodies. This is the first Landscape album that plays with recurring musical motifs, perhaps inspired a bit by film scores, where certain chord progressions will appear and reappear across multiple tracks. Here I am playing a naked fingerpicked guitar line from track 12 “The Cold And The Stars” with a 60’s Fender Jaguar in my basement over what is meant to invoke a winter storm at night, but in reality is the Electrical Audio Experiments ‘Hypersleep’ reverb pedal self oscillating wildly and a recording Andy made of some bell chimes in a forest near his house.

4. ”Forever Undone”

We recorded this at Backroom Studios in NJ with Kevin Antreassian of Dillinger Escape Plan, initially for a split with Portrayal of Guilt (huge fans) that sadly didn’t work out. Other than the song having a very rare full-on guitar solo, I honestly don’t remember much about the actual session because it was overshadowed by Kevin telling us he was about to redo the wood floors of the live room the next day. Andy and I drove to a sketchy pawn shop and bought two absolutely trash no-name electric guitars for like $40, tuned every string to C# or G#, dimed a couple halfstacks, and straight up battle axe smashed them to splinters while Kevin rolled tape. It was a stressful time for the band, a lot was about to change, and we needed that. This song was a bit of a dark horse; somewhat forgotten for a while but it ultimately found itself on the A-side of the record. It honestly sounds like your speakers are shredding and might secretly be a top five TSL song start.

5. “Bury In Time”

In the first iteration of the record, this was the opener. It seemed like we were wanting something less musical and more declarative here; almost a mission statement or a primer for the record to follow, as the song is just a two and a half minute build with a near monologue over it. With the final iteration of the song, we understood the drama of it better, the urgency, and pushed the orchestral vibes a bit more. We brought in Jeremy Harman of the Sirius Quartet for one of his many appearances on this record to double my guitars with cello, there is even a Mellotron choral line and a massive timpani drum.

Andy nailed the vocals in maybe two takes towards the end of that day, when his voice was on the brink of being gone, delivering one of my favorite performances and lyrics on the record, itself something of a key to everything else. “It is time we turn locked doors into ash. Today is not the day we stop trying.” You can hear the years of struggle and exhaustion in his voice as he faces this desire for change. It gives me chills. It’s too real.

6. “Hexes”

“Hexes” was the first new song that we brought into live shows, having premiered it during a run with The Sound Of Animals Fighting and Planes Mistaken For Stars in 2018. It was a song we were very confident in, one that changed very little from the first iteration to its final, though we did extend the central, “These hexes move quick, you can’t outrun the sick,” chant. The lead guitar part in the first minute is the hardest thing I play on the record, as I am just 200bpm spider-crawling around the neck in an odd rhythm with this massive roaring fuzz tone, then within a single count having to instantly palm my pick like a magic trick and immediately switch to clean amp country-western fingerpicking. It was in fact done live.

7. “A Loss Of Certainty”

This interlude was Danger and Andy fucking around in the basement through and through. At the sonic center is my massive 1970s Crumar Orchestrator synth set to maximum sub octave doom tones and Andy speed tremolo picking one of those Kurt Cobain Jag-stangs through like 4 delay pedals so barely any original signal is coming through. The whole house was shaking from the noise and the 20″ floor toms we were banging on, and you can hear my Snoopy lamp fall over at one point when a picture frame came crashing off the wall.

8. “The Invisible Hurt” (feat. Julien Baker)

There was initially a pretty major disconnect between Andy and myself during the conceptualizing and writing of this one. It came very late in the album process when we were already well into 2xLP territory, he wanted an extremely conversational Dolly & Kenny duet song that built to a fever pitch extended wall of guitars. He very clearly saw how the whole thing would function and move in his head but really had no idea what the music should be, so I sat there just writing melody after melody trying to make sense of it. The structure was manic, the transitions jarring, and it was nearly 8 minutes long. I really didn’t have much faith in it all the way through tracking the basics in Oakland. It wasn’t until Jeremy came in with his cello writing that I started to see the potential, part by part and with unexpected choices he ran the thread that kept that manic tethered to the beautiful. By the end of that process, I was excited and could see what Andy was trying to work towards, but we still only had one vocalist..

We had never met Julien, but heard through the grapevine she was a fan of the band after she reportedly shouted out one of our shirts in her audience. We wrote the initial pitch/demo of this song solely with her in mind with no back up plan. In fact, the file name of the demo session was “JULIEN HOPEFUL”. Presumably, I meant to write ‘hopefully’. We are massive fans of her albums, I bought Sprained Ankle the day it came out, and have always felt she pulled from the same raw open nerve approach that TSL thrives in. We hail-mary reached out and Julien was immediately on board and excited, understood and connected to the concept, and went above and beyond what we ever could have expected in terms of her involvement. Andy and I both teared up the first time we heard her vocals during the ending of the song, it was overwhelming. We cannot thank Julien and Jeremy enough for what they brought to this one.

9. “Kissed By Strangers”

Recorded originally as part of the Converse Rubber Tracks project, this was just a favorite song of ours that went a little too unheard and we wanted to give it a proper remix and include it on this record. The lead line that comes in at 1:18 is one of my favorite parts to play out of everything I play in this band. It bounces and loops so wonderfully.

10. “Hold Until It Hurts” (feat. Jeremy Bolm)

This was written specifically for the Albini sessions. I recall this one originally having a different opening. Andy and I rewrote it in like ten minutes, strumming unplugged guitars at a picnic table outside the studio where we were doing pre-production demos before going to Chicago. Sometimes in this band things are just suddenly different. This new opening always made me think of that certain era of 90’s hardcore where bassists always held their bass pointed outwards in a strange way and every snare was a piccolo snare. If you are of a certain age you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The bridge is unapologetic Friday Night Lights-core, Jeremy screaming all the way to the cheap seats before another “everyone locks in” chord progression launches, and there’s a resolving chord that finally appears in this part that makes me feel gooey inside. When Andy starts singing “Let me feel the hope in your arms, and hold me like it is the end.” I switch to my absolute favorite guitar line on this record, another spider-crawling octave-hopping loopy joy of a part. Clear eyes, full hearts…

11. “A Crow Black Wind”

A late-night basement interlude, this time much more freeform and improv. Andy invoking a Molina-esque chord progression and me doing some kind of loose delicate finger style on an old Guild Jetstar. Fun fact, Thurston Moore’s actual Ludwig Phase II used on Sonic Youth’s ‘The Diamond Sea’ makes a cameo appearance here, as do some birds.

12. “The Cold And The Stars”

This song is probably the most different of any from the first attempt of the album to the final, having completely rewritten the entire front half with Moe in his NJ rehearsal space into a huge, heavy, but really warm instrumental, with another extremely fun to play long guitar passage weaving through it. Our bassist, who we call Andy Beta, has a wonderful weaving bass and cello section here I really love. One of a few genre-hopping ideas in this one. Another of my favorite Andy moments is in this song, “Now it is always ‘I miss you’ or ‘Remember when?’, but I am never sure if you can hear.”

13. “Where Angels Ascend” (feat. Evan Weiss)

This one always had REM’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi vibes to me, which I am all about, and is something very different for this band (it’s got a swing to it!). But it also feels like it has a lot in common with the second ever TSL song “The Sixth Golden Ticket”, in that it is so clearly an honest love song above all else. It’s not about pining, a breakup, some manic pixie shit, or any of the many one-sided tropes of “emo”. It’s a declaration and acknowledgment of real devotion that has existed across decades. The line “You are the one who understands me, so completely” hits like a train passing.

Evan was a trooper for recording this entire song twice for us. Thanks Buddy.

14. “A Badge Of Hope”

The chords of this interlude, played here on a Rhodes electric piano (by two people in a way not dissimilar to pottery wheel scene from the movie GHOST), appear in a handful of songs on the record, in different forms. I wanted certain moments to feel familiar to the listener, even if not immediately obvious – little ghosts of music. We recorded this in Oakland and Jack played singing saw, creating this haunting wind-like howl that we love so much. Jack had to be very task-oriented with us because of how much we had to do in such a small amount of time. We needed his firm, no nonsense squashing of any time wasting and any indecision; so it brought me great joy when it was suddenly Singing Saw time at the studio. In the end, I recorded this song to a broken dying cassette recorder and played it back while sort of squishing the walkman with my palm to get it to both function and distort. It’s not some plugin, but my actual shitty walkman…

15. “A Shadow Of Faith”

If there is ever an exhaustive Metallica-style 10xLP deluxe box set of this album, we could devote an entire LP to this one song because there are so many iterations: home demos, pre-production recordings and at least three different studio versions. I’m not one for immediate praise, I tend to keep a poker face when I’m listening in a studio much to everyone’s annoyance, but I remember muttering an audible “…god DAMN..” to Jack when Andy reached the “untie the knot, cut. the. strings.” line in vocal tracking. He is a force of nature.

16. “Alone With Heaven”

The title track of Alone With Heaven was very much written with Albini in mind, though I’ll note it actually did not appear on the first iteration of the album. In early discussions of starting over, Andy heard something in his head that he felt the album was missing, based on something our bassist came up with and we went for it. We wrote it spread out in my basement mid-Covid and did a particularly great demo of it with Jay Maas, who engineered Darkness Forgives back in 2015. We wanted something very open and very drum-forward, quiet loud quiet loud, clanging noises and riding tension; something that would play to the infamous room sound approach of Electrical Audio. We thought a lot about what aspects of TSL’s sound could truly explode with his approach, and ultimately we wrote something slower where we could really hear the air move.

One really cannot overstate the influence Steve Albini had on the kind of music we all love, and my own approach to guitar, so getting to spend any amount of time with him was an absolute joy, a wonderful learning experience, and an anxiety ridden imposter syndrome pool of stress for every bone in my body. You are naked in that room and that man looking at you through the window made In Utero. But I got to play his guitar from Big Black, and his original 1970’s Harmonic Perculator pedal that is on basically every Shellac song ever written, so the gear nerd in me was hyped up as a coping mechanism for how nervous I really was. But he was always calm, always had a fun way to say a hard thing, and by the second day I found my comfort.

Watching him cut and splice the reel-to-reel tape like a surgeon while casually telling insane stories of our heroes and massive truth bombs is permanently burned into my skull as a core memory. If you’re a recording studio, band, or person in general who doesn’t or won’t take at least a few cues from Steve Albini, I probably can’t trust you, and you’re more than likely on some level full of shit. Authenticity above all else, the realism of flaws, the sound of distance, abrasion and clang being capable of holding beautiful moments, visceral inside thoughts becoming outside explosions, hypnotic violence in the physical sound of instruments, antagonism while still holding ethics, and the importance of antics… Just a world class asshole and first rate shit talker and one of the most honest and smartest people to ever do it. The world is actively worse without him in it. Thank you, Steve.