LOCAL CONCERT ALERT (Heavy Lies The Crown) & More Winter Updates From Their Camp!!

It's been two months since we last talked about St. Ignace, Michigan deathcore band Heavy Lies The Crown on the SMS in regards to new activity, so what have they been up to as of late? We left off in mid-December, and we'll pick things back up on the 13th of that month with this short Facebook video from singer Brandon West (again introduced here as "Heavy" despite no other band members being present), where he teased the impending delivery of their newest round of official H.L.T.C. hockey jerseys. They arrived three days later, featuring artwork by bassist Christian Cook, and you can see how they turned out at this link! Jerseys were largely made to order with limited extras, but message the band to see about possible availability or to express interest in possible future orders. The band's last proper musical updates of 2024 were their second and third "Studio Update" videos.

Studio Update #2 from December 16th covers similar ground to the first one (footage of guitarist Kaycee Mason and drummer Blaze Beairl tracking material for their forthcoming third full-length album), but does so in colour, while Studio Update #3 from the 21st focuses on Christian (with those hands, though!), albeit in black & white. No sign of Brandon or "travelling" guitarist Jaxon Massaway in either upload, and both continue to use the same clip of "These Walls" as the backing audio. Good to see things progressing throughout the winter, so give the new update videos a watch!

While not featured in the above update videos, Brandon was slated to wrap up vocals "soon" as of January 9th, when the band also teased the possibility of adding more tracks to the album after reviewing what they've recorded so far. The following week, they teased possibly including a featured artist on their new album, and asked fans for suggestions, while they said that "I think these songs are gonna hit different" on January 23rd. Starting later that month, H.L.T.C. began announcing concerts of theirs for 2025, and the first will see them rock Cabin Fever Fest 2 at the From Huron Out Pub in Oscoda (3½ hours southeast of the Soo) over the March 22nd weekend. Twelve bands are scheduled to play this two night festival, including Lansing experimental hard rock band Mr. Denton On Doomsday, who Sault Michigan readers may recall from multiple local gigs in the 2000s. Nice to see them in an SMS post again after 16 long years, albeit not for a local date!

Regarding their new album, they posted a Facebook poll on January 27th to inquire about physical formats to potentially release it on (as far as I'm aware, their two  albums and their debut EP were digitally exclusive). CDs won in a landslide, but we'll let you know if you can actually hold the next album when it's released! On January 28th, Heavy Lies The Crown shared two "Reels" on their Facebook page featuring footage of their set at Fight Breast Cancer With Music at The Delft Theater in Escanaba in October, finally letting us see video footage from that night with actual live audio (they previously only posted a highlight/teaser compilation featuring multiple bands, but with "These Walls" dubbed over). One is of them playing "*69", while the other "Reel" is not labelled as to which song. Click on each to see them, as "Reels" remain unembeddable on external websites and unplayable in background tabs.

While it is great to see actual raw footage from their last concert of 2024, they are horizontal landscape videos forcibly pillarboxed into the vertical "Reel" dimensions, and while they have text captions above, why let these videos be so tiny when they don't have to be? Also on January 28th, H.L.T.C. announced a LOCAL CONCERT ALERT for actually local fans, as they will host their third annual 2nd Street Music Festival at 376 North 2nd Street in their St. Ignace hometown on Saturday, August 9th! Like in the past two years, this is being hyped around Brandon's birthday, and further details are to be confirmed, but it's great to see the guys playing a proper E.U.P. show again! We're lucky to see Heavy Lies The Crown in our coverage range twice in a calendar year. If this is similar to the last two installments, this will be a FREE & ALL AGES outdoor event at 7:00 PM with a few extra bands (last year featured Tarnished and Hannahville metal band Ghidora.)

We'll leave things here for now, but they have been quite active posting videos/"Reels" on Facebook in the past three weeks, so it shouldn't be too long before we look at more from Heavy Lies The Crown on the site.