The Hold Steady’s “Heaven is Whenever” Cover Art: Simple But Beautiful

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In today’s age of digital downloads and evaporating record sales, everything we know about the album is going by the wayside.

Track order used to be a daunting and precise task, CD booklets offered as much in the way of supplementary entertainment as the band desired to eager fans, and album covers were often the iconic image associated with classic collections of music. Case in point: who can’t think of Dark Side of the Moon without picturing that rainbow-crossed prism with the black background?

While Brooklyn-based rockers The Hold Steady may be known much more for their riff-heavy classic rock stylings and frontman Craig Finn’s massively dense lyrical tales, they know how to convey thoughts about their albums through the covers. Their last release, 2008′s highly acclaimed (they’ve actually been highly acclaimed since their debut) Stay Positive, presented a rough, brown, dirty image of a small, dumpy, and utterly soulless town that Finn sang about on tracks like “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis.”

The cover art for their latest album, Heaven is Whenever (due in stores May 4) is probably the simplest album cover they’ve released to date, and perhaps their most powerful. The titles are in text that is decorated only slightly, giving us a clear indication of who we’re getting into, and reaching for the text is the hand of a young boy or girl.

Lead guitarist Tad Kubler described the music of Heaven is Whenever in a press release announcing the album as “evocative,” adding that “There’s a lot more melody. It’s more sonically diverse and dynamically expansive than any of our previous records.”

Finn described his lyrics as being about “embracing suffering and understanding its place in a joyful life.” He explained the significance of the album’s title as referencing “the way that love can help us rise above our modern struggles.” Man does that guy ever know how to express himself!

With dozens of tour dates already lined up, appearances scheduled at several summer festivals such as Lollapalooza and the Isle of Wight Festival, and an as-of-this-writing opening between May 30 and June 12, I am hoping as a Bonnaroo ticket holder that The Hold Steady will be added to the four-day Manchester, Tenn. festival as a second-tier headliner.

The Hold Steady Announce New Album, “Heaven is Whenever,” Track Listing

Source: David Shankbone

The Hold Steady remain one of America’s most acclaimed and hard-working rock bands. They have yet to miss with the critics, with their 2008 album, “Stay Positive,” earning a composite score of 85 on Metacritic, constituting “universal acclaim,” and have steadily rose in popularity since their inception due to their dense, arena-ready rock aesthetic and frontman Craig Finn’s complex yet powerfully vivid lyrics. The Brooklyn-based group is now set to release their highly anticipated fifth album, “Heaven is Whenever,” on May 4 from Vagrant Records.

The album will be the band’s first without keyboardist Franz Nicolay, who suddenly left the band in January to get a fresh start and explore other career interests such as vaudeville acting and tap dancing.

Finn and lead guitarist Tad Kubler said in a press release interview that the album will be a departure from their previous two LPs, “Stay Positive” and “Boys and Girls in America.” Kubler described the music as “spacial” and “sonically more diverse” than their previous work, noting shifts and expansions of his guitar style that haven’t been heard before.

Finn said that the stories in his songs- a mandatory topic to cover when discussing a Hold Steady album- will be more about expressing a cohesive overall theme than spinning tales of the characters he’s created, particularly “Gideon,” “Charlemagne” and “Holly,” who have become very familiar to fans. Finn said in the interview of the album’s themes:

“The lyrics speak a lot about struggle and reward. It’s about embracing suffering and understanding its place in a joyful life. I think that some of the characters from old records are there, but I don’t name them by name. I think it continues to examine the highs and lows that we’ve looked at on previous records.”

The elements of the Hold Steady’s work that remain constant throughout their discography are the intense, verbose wordplay of Finn’s lyrics and the consistently exhilarating music accompanying them. From their descriptions, it sounds like fans will get more of the same plus an expansion and maturity of their musical palette. It seems almost impossible for them to disappoint us at this point.

Here is the track listing for “Heaven is Whenever”:

1.  The Sweet Part of the City
2.  Soft in the Center
3.  The Weekenders
4.  The Smidge
5.  Rock Problems
6.  We Can Get Together
7.  Hurricane J
8.  Barely Breathing
9.  Our Whole Lives
10.  A Slight Discomfort

Here’s a video from back in September of the band playing an early version of one of the new tracks- called “Heaven is Whenever” here, but likely actually track six, “We Can Get Together.”