I love bands that reappear, like a long-forgotten feeling you suddenly remember in a grocery store aisle. The Saddest Landscape obviously enjoy this sort of vibe as their new album, Alone With Heaven (out April 24 via Iodine Recordings), is their first full-length in over a decade. This is just long enough for any band to dissipate into the fog of evaporated ideas. Over ten years. In that amount of time the world has changed its language for pain, grief, anxiety, hope, survival—but the actual experiences didn’t change at all and obviously that’s where the band is cashing in the raincheck as the moment feels necessary again. Which I guess is different than waiting until it feels profitable.
This record also carries the elegant gravity of being partly produced by Steve Albini, whose presence in underground music has always felt more like a certification of reality than a producer credit. Albini has never made bands sound better, he makes them sound more truthful (which is a rare skill and hard to tackle without an exhausting and brutal discipline). Knowing that Alone With Heaven is among his final recordings gives the album an unintended velocity: not as a tribute, not as a monument, but as a document of something honest that happened before something irreversible ended. (Kind of a bummer don’t you think?)
The first single, “From Home They Run,” isn’t posing as a lead single, it’s not trying to sell itself as anything flashy. It functions more like a modest articulation about tension, release, and obvious collapse. Andy Maddox describes the song in terms of anxiety, melody, relief, and emotional waves—but what he’s really describing is the rare feeling of your nervous system briefly shutting up. No real peace or happiness. Just quiet. The tiny window where your brain stops narrating your worst fears like a documentary voiceover.
The guest appearances (Julien Baker, Jeremy Bolm, Evan Weiss) are more like alignment signals than flexes. They tell you what emotional universe this record exists in. Not performative despair. Not chaos. Not nihilism. This music is about endurance and staying alive with real intent. Even the physicality of the release matters: a double gatefold LP, a 16-page insert with art by Daniel Danger (who has worked with everyone from The Cure to Nine Inch Nails to Guillermo del Toro), which means the band understands that this isn’t just an album—it’s an object, a container, a thing you’re supposed to live with for a while. This is not streaming-era background music. It’s sit-with-it music. It’s stare-at-the-wall music.
Alone With Heaven is a reminder that some bands don’t exist to soundtrack your best moments—they exist to translate the parts of your life that don’t have language yet. The parts where grief isn’t dramatic, hope isn’t cinematic, and survival isn’t heroic—it’s just quiet persistence.
