The Sewerheads - Despair is a Heaven LP

It’s only fitting that Pittsburgh—a metropolis known for its gloomy neo-Gothic architecture and Rust Belt hardiness—is home to a band like The Sewerheads. This plucky four-piece of scene regulars makes minor-key, violin-laden rock that, much like their hometown, resides at the crossroads of torment and bliss. Each menacing guitar stab and sultry croon evokes a city at once lamenting the fall of its past industrial glory and reveling in its underappreciated beauty and grit. The band’s haunting debut album, Despair Is a Heaven, conjures the Steel City’s sticky summer nights and its churches’ pointed arches, but it’s also an unabashed ode to Americana, inspired by the cowboy tales of Ernest Tubb, the dirty realism of John Fante, and the amorphous morality of John Cassavetes’ films, as well as the somber Australian balladry of Rowland S. Howard.