This Heat ended up being called post-punk for lack of any better options, and though their music has many of the now-familiar hallmarks of that genre — a heavy dub influence, a fascination with the streamlined metaphysics of German kosmische bands, particularly Can, and complex, heady concepts communicated via primeval methods– it still stands apart, with something alien and unnamable at its core. Nearly a half-century after its release, This Heat’s entrancing, horrifying and ecstatic self-titled debut still lands like a vision of the end of the world, or at least the end of a world, its messages conflicting and coded but bracingly pure and full of possibility.
Category: This Heat
Lifetones :: For A Reason
Outside. South London, early 1983. On For a Reason, Charles Bullen and Julius Cornelius Samuel pull away from the tightly wound scaffolding of This Heat into something slower, heavier, and more open-ended. Basslines circulate, rhythms drift, and dub space begins to overtake the frame. Forty years later, the record still feels uncannily present after dark.
This Heat :: Made Available: John Peel Sessions
“I get asked to play more music like This Heat, but to my knowledge there is no other music like This Heat” – John Peel
For 37 years, John Peel worked as a conduit, pulling unheard voices out of the static and setting them loose across the BBC dial. In 1977, one of those voices was This Heat, formed just a year earlier in a Camberwell rehearsal space. Frayed at the edges, with clipped rhythms pushed straight to broadcast, they didn’t sound like a band adapting to a Maida Vale studio so much as one ignoring the usual expectations of a radio session.