The face on the cover has already passed beyond an ordinary expression. Its eyes are stretched wide, the mouth held in a gigantic smile or scream, and the halftone printing breaks the surface into thousands of dots, as though the figure has been transmitted through an old newspaper, photocopier, television screen, and memory before reaching us. Turquoise and magenta ordinarily suggest brightness, summer merchandise, candy wrappers, swimming pools, and inexpensive pop pleasure. Here they cover something grotesque. The image feels delighted and terrified at once. It is the face of someone entering heaven who has suddenly realized that heaven may be too intense for a human nervous system.
Every Heaven is an equally unstable title. “Heaven” generally names the final perfect place, singular and absolute. Adding “every” multiplies perfection until it becomes personal, temporary, and perhaps contradictory. Every person may carry a different heaven. One heaven is romantic union, another solitude, another youth, another the right song arriving during a difficult year. A former relationship can become heaven in memory even when living inside it was impossible. An old musical era can feel like heaven to someone who did not fully inhabit it the first time. Once heaven becomes plural, it stops being merely a destination after life and becomes the name given to those moments when life briefly seems to fit.
The project name pulls in the opposite direction. Humdrum means ordinary, repetitive, lacking excitement. It describes routine after wonder has departed. Placed beside Every Heaven, the name creates the record’s central tension: transcendence is being sought through familiar materials. These songs do not attempt to invent a previously unheard musical language. They return to chiming guitars, softly diffused vocals, melodic bass movement, propulsive drums, pastel reverb, and the emotional grammar of late-1980s and early-1990s indie pop. The revelation is not that the past can be perfectly recreated. It is that old forms remain capable of receiving new lives.
Loren Vanderbilt began Humdrum after the pandemic interrupted and eventually dissolved Star Tropics. That origin matters because the album is saturated with movement following stoppage. Songs written from 2019 onward gradually became a bridge between one creative identity and another. The music frequently sounds as though it is running, but not necessarily running away. Sometimes it is running beside someone, back toward something, around a bend, beneath the sky, or simply fast enough to restart circulation after an emotional numbness.
The brief title track assembles the album piece by piece. Guitar, rhythm, reverb, and atmosphere appear like parts of a landscape becoming visible at sunrise. Because it contains no conventional lyrical argument, the piece acts as an invitation rather than an explanation. Near its end, a sampled voice asks what it is about this place and observes that it resembles another world. The question describes the emotional technology of indie pop. A few guitars, a drum pattern, and the right production can construct a parallel environment whose geography is made entirely from association.
Those associations are proudly visible. The guitars carry the bright, liquid movement of early R.E.M., Felt, The Railway Children, and the melodic edge of Sarah Records, while the wider atmosphere remembers New Order, Pale Saints, Ride, Slowdive, and the period when indie pop and shoegaze had not yet been organized into separate museum rooms. Yet the album does not merely imitate a record collection. Influence has passed through Vanderbilt’s own history, including Star Tropics, Chicago, the pandemic, adult relationships, disappointment, and the particular questions of continuing to make romantic guitar music as a queer artist in his thirties.
“There and Back Again” makes return its explicit structure. The title is familiar from Tolkien, but here it also points toward Sarah Records’ final release, the label closing its doors by looking simultaneously backward and homeward. Vanderbilt uses that phrase to describe an on-again, off-again relationship whose repetitions have become a form of geography. Two people travel away from and toward each other so often that the route itself begins replacing the destination.
The music moves with far more confidence than the relationship it describes. Drums press forward, guitars shimmer, and the melody supplies the certainty the words cannot locate. This is one of pop music’s most durable forms of emotional alchemy. Doubt becomes singable without being solved. The listener receives forward motion while the narrator remains unsure whether the relationship can survive another bend. The body is carried ahead by a song whose mind is still looking backward.
“Superbloom” turns this motion into romantic possibility. A superbloom occurs when dormant seeds respond to unusually favorable conditions and suddenly cover a landscape with color. The apparent miracle depends upon life that was already present but invisible, waiting beneath dry ground. As a love-song image, it is almost too perfect for a project born after pandemic isolation. Feeling has not been manufactured from nothing. Conditions have changed enough for buried capacities to emerge.
The invitation to run together through heaven gives the song its buoyancy, but the question remains an invitation rather than a guarantee. Love is imagined as coordinated movement. One person cannot create the shared escape alone. The song’s exhilarating guitars therefore carry a quiet vulnerability: the speaker is already running and hopes the other person will choose the same direction.
“Wave Goodbye” contains one of the album’s simplest word-morphs. A wave is a gesture of departure, but also a moving body of energy. To wave goodbye is to communicate separation through motion, while a sound wave allows the goodbye to continue long after the original gesture has ended. Recorded music preserves departures this way. Someone leaves, a band ends, a relationship closes, but the emotional wave continues traveling through speakers.
The song is bright enough that goodbye does not become complete devastation. Humdrum understands that departures can contain relief, affection, regret, and momentum at once. The jangle keeps opening windows inside the loss. Sadness is present, but it has air moving through it.
“Test of Time” slows the album just enough to ask what survives repetition. The phrase is often applied retrospectively to music, relationships, institutions, and promises that remain meaningful after novelty has faded. Yet no object passes the test of time unchanged. Records age, production styles reveal their decades, memories alter emphasis, and people hear beloved songs through older bodies. Survival is not immunity from change. It is the ability to continue communicating while change accumulates.
This is especially relevant to music so openly devoted to earlier styles. Every Heaven does not prove the timelessness of jangle pop by stripping away its historical identity. It proves it by allowing that identity to remain audible while discovering a present need for it. The chiming guitar still works because longing has not become obsolete. A chorus still lifts because human beings continue needing brief structures in which uncertainty can feel complete.
“See Through You” introduces a sharper kind of perception. To see through someone can mean recognizing deception, but it can also mean seeing a person as transparent or insubstantial. Dream pop frequently creates voices that sound partly dissolved inside the surrounding instruments. Here that softness does not eliminate confrontation. The song’s energetic surface and more suspicious emotional position create a tension between attraction and recognition. Beauty no longer guarantees trust.
Scott Hibbitts’ lead guitar is crucial throughout the record because it rarely functions as ornamental soloing. The lines act as second voices, answering or complicating Vanderbilt’s melodies. They brighten corners, extend phrases beyond the lyric, and supply small upward motions when the words become uncertain. Melissa Buckley’s backing vocals perform a related function, widening the private monologue into a social space. Even though Humdrum began as a rebuilding project centered on one songwriter, the finished album does not sound sealed inside one person.
“Eternal Blue,” the album’s longest piece, allows the emotional weather to expand. Blue is sky, water, distance, sadness, devotion, and the color created by light scattering through atmosphere. Calling it eternal turns a passing mood into a horizon. One can move toward the horizon indefinitely without reaching it, yet it continues organizing the landscape.
The keyboards and layered guitars give the track a greater sense of scale without abandoning the album’s intimacy. It feels like a private emotion discovering that the sky has been feeling it too. This is one of dream pop’s characteristic gifts: inward states are projected outward until weather, light, and distance seem to participate. The person is not cured of sadness, but sadness is no longer confined to one body.
“Ultraviolet” names light beyond ordinary human vision. We know it exists through its effects even though our eyes cannot directly perceive it. The title therefore belongs naturally to an album concerned with hidden emotional continuities. Love, grief, influence, identity, and memory frequently become visible through what they alter rather than through direct observation.
Musically, the song’s brightness seems almost capable of exceeding the visible spectrum. The guitars shine while the emotional content remains harder to locate, producing the pleasurable uncertainty that separates dream pop from straightforward confession. Not everything felt intensely can be translated into a clean statement. Sometimes music records the effect without identifying the source.
“Come and Get Me” reverses the running imagery by asking another person to cross the distance. It can sound flirtatious, defiant, vulnerable, or exhausted depending upon how the invitation is heard. The speaker is available but unwilling or unable to complete the entire journey alone. Pop songs are filled with such invitations because desire is always partly a problem of geography. Someone must move.
The album’s drums make that movement physical. They are not buried beneath shoegaze haze or reduced to decorative timekeeping. Their pulse gives the record a cardiovascular character. Slumberland’s description of the pause between heartbeats is particularly apt: silence may be brief for one person and terrifyingly extended for another, but the next beat changes the meaning of the pause. Humdrum sounds like that returning beat.
“Underneath the Sky” closes without attempting to reach beyond the atmosphere. After every heaven, superbloom, eternal blue, and ultraviolet illumination, the final song places the listener underneath rather than inside the sky. This is a modest but important position. The sky remains above, visible and unreachable. Transcendence has not abolished earthly location.
To live underneath the sky is to share one enormous ceiling with people traveling in different directions. Lovers separate beneath it. Bands dissolve beneath it. Records are made, mailed, discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered beneath it. The phrase joins intimacy to scale without requiring the individual to become cosmic. A small human life can remain small and still participate in something immeasurable.
The cover’s ecstatic, frightened face now begins to resemble the listener caught between those scales. Its expression is too large for one emotion because the album’s heavens are not purely comforting. Nostalgia can restore and imprison. A familiar musical language can provide shelter while reminding us that the period associated with it has disappeared. Renewal carries evidence of whatever had to end before renewal became necessary.
There is sometimes a suspicion that artists working through visibly older styles are avoiding the present. That suspicion mistakes time for a row of locked rooms. Music never travels neatly from past to future. Riffs, recording methods, clothing, formats, local scenes, and emotional codes disappear and return because each generation encounters them under altered conditions. The person hearing Felt or Sarah Records decades later is not having the original experience badly. They are creating another experience from the surviving signal.
Every Heaven is convincing because Vanderbilt does not pretend to have discovered these sounds without predecessors. The references are part of the pleasure. Listeners can trace guitars toward R.E.M., vocals toward The Wake, rhythms toward New Order, haze toward Pale Saints, and romantic directness toward Sarah Records. But influence is not subtraction. Mapping the tributaries does not make the river disappear.
Slumberland is the ideal home for such a record because the label has spent decades treating indie pop not as a frozen period style but as a renewable social language. Its releases repeatedly demonstrate that modest-scale music can carry enormous emotional weather. Every Heaven enters that continuity without becoming anonymous within it. The album knows the neighborhood, but it has its own address.
The word “humdrum” finally loses its insult. Repetition is how songs become companions, how routes become homes, how relationships acquire histories, and how a person rebuilding after collapse discovers that another day has arrived. Heaven may not be one permanent destination waiting beyond ordinary life. It may be hidden inside the humdrum, appearing whenever familiar elements suddenly align and the next heartbeat arrives on time.
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