Sean Henry - HEAD (2024) [Hi-Res]

Everyone knows Sean Henry.

HEAD is an album of slacker rock anthems for downtown loners and hometown heshers.

The artist grew up religiously releasing home recordings under a variety of project names. He announced himself as Sean Henry (one name – no last name) with an obituary in the town newspaper. It only cost him $20.

Henry moved to NYC, dropping out of college and landing on Double Double Whammy’s couch. After a week or so, the label gave him a bedroom under an odd financial arrangement: $200 rent if he mailed out all their records.

It wasn’t long before he shipped his own first album. With sticky pop hooks and lo-fi production, It’s All About Me established Sean Henry as a pillar of the NYC underground.

He was sucked even deeper into the city’s music scene when he moved into a punk house off Myrtle-Broadway. They hosted shows every night. “I saw every band in Brooklyn at least three times,” he says. “The music never stopped before 2 AM.”

With the release of Fink, the songwriter pushed into darker territory. It was his first studio album, and his first collaboration with producer Brian Antonucci. The pair met in Catholic school and bonded when Sean Henry wore a Dead Kennedys shirt to gym class.

After the release, Sean Henry moved back to Connecticut. “New York had broken up with me,” he says. The years since have been marked by a push and pull between the city and the singer’s hometown. Sean Henry submits to “the general beatdown that New York always provides” before retreating to Connecticut to make another record. Sean Henry’s last album, A Jump from the High Dive, leans into his signature soft grunge sound, with echoes of slowcore and 90s alt rock.

HEAD follows this thread. The album features tape-warbled acoustics and overdriven electrics. Sean Henry weaves warped samples and saturated trip-hop drums into a bold sonic collage. Often groovy, often melodic. Sometimes hushed, and sometimes howling. It’s an album of existential earworms.

The writing and recording process was all-consuming. “It was an obsession,” Sean Henry says. The obsession lasted over two years. He set out with a clear inspiration—a series of near-death experiences, and the downward spiral they triggered.

One late night, driving down a windy road in his hometown, Sean Henry hit a deer. The injured animal limped into the woods. The car’s damage was minimal. He’d gotten off easy. Just a few nights later, though, Sean Henry lost control of the wheel on the highway and smashed into the guardrail.

His car was destroyed. “The darkness really overtook me at that point,” he remembers. “That car was my escape. I was stuck, and totally alone.” The songwriter’s brush with death set off a string of neuroses and anxieties that further deepened his isolation. “I wondered if I even existed,” he says.

Against this emotional backdrop, Sean Henry began writing HEAD. He planned to produce a record of his descent into madness. The album he ended up with tells a different story. HEAD is hopeful, even when misfortune lurks just outside the frame.

Track one wakes up into a dream—within its first lines, we’re already out of our bodies, soaring toward the ceiling like the figure on the album cover. The tracks that follow encompass a wide scope. “Jamproof” is a bass driven groove with plinking piano and crackling vinyl. “Burn It Out” is a twangy hometown banger with guest vocals from Lowertown’s Olivia O. The album finishes with a cover of “In Heaven,” an eerie ballad famously performed by a tiny woman inside a radiator in David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like the film, this record presents a dark world with an optimistic sheen.

One of the album’s most memorable lines is the “Jamproof” refrain, “Nothing’s gonna get me down,” sung in a slightly unsettling whisper. On the eve of his first single release in four years, Sean Henry’s NYC apartment burnt down. Thank God for his persistence.