The Heavenly Bodes – De Groene Heuvels
Cornish four-piece The Heavenly Bodes have announced Green Hills, their debut album, due July 3 via Fuzz Club. “De Groene Heuvels” is the second single, following “Faux Pillars”, and it arrives straight off the back of a headline UK tour in May. The band, Paul Ruskin (vocals/guitar), Fin Wilson (vocals/guitar/organ), Iolo Puleston (bass), and Alex Mantle (drums), came together through South Cornwall’s grassroots psych scene, specifically through chance encounters at Kernowbeat shows in Falmouth, and have been building steadily since their 2025 EP A Shelf You Can Applaud At A Distance picked up BBC 6 Music and Radio X support.
The recording circumstances are half the story. Green Hills was tracked live into a Fostex R-8 8-track reel-to-reel in a friend’s living room in Penryn during the Swanpool heatwave of July 2025, recorded and mixed entirely by Wilson. The band’s own description of the process is a small masterpiece of understatement: “a testament to the clearly adequate cooling systems of the Fostex R-8.” The tape hiss isn’t a production choice so much as a condition of the room, which is undoubtedly how it sounds.
“De Groene Heuvels” runs just over two and a half minutes and doesn’t waste any of them. The band describe it as following “the account of a whirlwind weekend on a Dutch hillside”, with the track feeling like “the struggle of staying upright on an uneven surface, leg twisting and eye twitching.” That’s accurate: fuzzed-out guitar, a bass groove that leans into the rhythm hard, the whole thing bouncing along with a looseness that sounds genuinely live rather than performed. What gets me about it is how well the rawness serves the energy rather than excusing a lack of it: this isn’t unpolished because they couldn’t help it, it’s unpolished because anything else would kill the momentum. The 60s acid-garage reference points are there, but they don’t overwhelm the song; it sounds like a band who absorbed those influences years ago and stopped thinking about them.
Green Hills is out July 3 via Fuzz Club.
