Grumpy: The Best of What’s Next

Anya’s journey, though, begins even earlier, and reads like an indie bildungsroman: homeschooled by young bohemian parents, raised in a Northern California town with a strong artsy homeschooling community, and taught Beatles covers by a friend’s dad at the ripe age of eight. “He taught a bunch of us kids how to play different instruments,” she explains. “Bass, guitar, keys, drums. And he was like, ‘We should all meet weekly and I’ll teach you cover songs.’” In other words, there are about eight, maybe nine years of Anya’s life in total where she was not in a band (some standout names include: Chrome Donut, Secret Cat, and Hose Rips).

Anya entered the picture the moment Heaven glimpsed a photo of her on a friend’s phone. “It was like love at first sight,” Heaven recalls. “I was like, ‘Who’s that? Who is that?!’” Anya lived in LA at the time, but that did not deter Heaven in the slightest. “I just DM’d her until she agreed to move here,” they grin. “Knowing how special Anya is, I still cannot believe that worked. But it sure did, and Anya’s been my closest collaborator in art ever since.”

Diego was the final piece of the puzzle, discovered on Heaven’s first day in New York. “I met Diego and instantly knew they were special,” they say. The night they met, Heaven went home and listened to Diego’s music. “From that day, I was like, ‘This person will be in my band.’” But it took them two years to ask them. Now, with Diego now firmly a member, Heaven finally feels like Grumpy has reached the version of itself it was always meant to be, “Pokémon evolution” style. “This feels very ‘Grumpy final form,’” they gush. “It feels like so much more is possible. It feels so much more fun.”

THE BAND’S NAME CAME, LIKE many truths, from a casual read. “‘You’re just being grumpy,’” Austin told Heaven one day, all the way back when they were still dating. “And I was like, damn,” Heaven remembers. “That would be a really good band name.”

Taking on that self-deprecating moniker was less an ironic move than a tongue-in-cheek dedication to Heaven’s own autobiographical sense of self. “Where I was in my life at the time, as a young person, that’s just how I felt,” they explain. “I had a lot of anger, and I think it’s because I didn’t know how to ask for the respect and the treatment that I wanted.”

Grumpiness was, in fact, the hurdle Heaven struggled to jump, at first: “I was just such a tortured student, you know? I just had such a belief that I had to be in immense pain to make art that anyone would care about. So the whole genesis of Grumpy was me figuring out how to make music fun.” And as time went on, the “grumpiness” of Grumpy melted away. “So much of my anger dissipated because I figured out what I needed. I found the language to ask for it.”

Still, it took time. Grumpy’s 2020 debut Loser was a vulnerable, earnest, acoustic indie-pop record, and while it was genuinely quite good, Heaven felt that it was too clean, too unlike them. Loser was raw and revealing, but it wasn’t quite what they wanted. The arrangements felt too restrained, the energy too muted. In time, they’ve come to feel that the record had so many fingerprints on it that it was no longer theirs. (Austin, on the other hand, crosses his arms and mock-grumbles “Well, I like the old Grumpy,” to everyone’s fond amusement).

For four years following the release of Loser, Grumpy was in a period of flux, both musically and personally. Heaven began reconsidering everything: the shape of the songs, the collaborators, the production, the name. Maybe “Grumpy” was too self-deprecating. Maybe the project itself had already run its course. Heaven flirted with alternatives to the name for a while—a particularly memorable trial run being “Batney,” a childhood deep-cut reference to a fictional artist, “Batney Ears,” that Heaven remembers seeing on a Quiznos kids’ CD. The band dropped the “Ears” part of the name (a decision Anya still vocally disagrees with), but then thought the name Batney was altogether too unintelligible before abandoning it entirely. And even outside of the band, life offered upheaval after upheaval: band members divorced, met, got together, broke up, moved to New York, learned to self-produce, went through COVID-19. Most crucially, Heaven and Austin finally met Lane, Anya, and Diego, one by one.

In a sense, the long-awaited return to Grumpy in 2024—New York DIY ethos buoying their sound with Lane, Anya, and Diego all in tow—wasn’t a revival so much as a reclamation. Heaven knew what they wanted now: a sound and a project that could hold joy and grotesquerie all at once. Grumpy remained the name, and by then had taken on something of a new meaning. It’s often talked about as Heaven’s hammed-up alter ego, but that’s not quite it. Lane succinctly explains why that’s not quite the case: “I don’t think [Heaven] could ham it up anymore than they already do!” “Let’s be honest,” Heaven interjects, “Grumpy the character is fully just me. It’s me with an excuse to be louder, like I ever really needed that.”

AT THE VISUAL HELM OF this transformation was Anya Good, whose “many terabytes of files” and honed instinct for Photoshop (sharpened by a bohemian homeschool education and early access to Windows 98) would intimidate any amateur graphic designer. The world she renders—scrapbooked, eerie, surreal, and utterly bizarre—is precisely the world the band inhabits. It’s like Smile 2 meets The Muppets Take Manhattan meets the melancholy of a Bergman film. “I started to build up this whole idea of what Heaven really wanted to be presented as,” Anya says. “And nobody had done that for them yet.” One image in particular, Heaven in a top hat à la Slenderman, unlocked the character of Grumpy in full. “It was exactly what I wanted,” Heaven recalls. “So now I just say, ‘Here’s the outfit I’m going to wear, here’s the setting—do whatever the hell you want.’” And Anya does. No edits, just trust.

“I’m always, production-wise, trying to figure out—what is the choice we can make that bangs but still makes you laugh?” Heaven says. “How ugly can I show myself to be while still having it be fun?” Those questions are the animating forces behind this new era of Grumpy; the entire point is straddling concepts often perceived as completely unrelated, whether those concepts be thematic (i.e. ugly and fun) or musical (i.e. hyperpop and folk). Fittingly, Grumpy’s relationship to genre is—much like their relationship to most everything else—fluid, amorphous, and not especially concerned with fitting into tidy boxes. “To me, picking a genre label is about as important as what outfit I’m choosing to wear,” Heaven explains. “It’s just an opportunity for fun and expression.” Austin, ever genre-agnostic, takes a firmer stance: “Honestly? It’s no longer helpful for us to talk about genre. Like, just listen to music!”

Still, the band entertains genre suggestions like party favors: goosebumps twee bravado rock (Anya’s contribution), Victorian truck stop (Heaven’s description of their own fashion sense), or the scene-coined chaos tag dirty bag twee, which Heaven attributes to local hero, “certified genius, and pillar of the community” Logan Chung. Heaven lights up describing the now-memeified label, which somehow ended up the subject of a 2023 Nylon article: “It got too close to the sun. But that is such a win.” Diego chimes in: “No one even knows what it is. That’s the beauty.” There is one tag that’s stuck, at least a little: “hyperfolk.” This portmanteau was bestowed upon Grumpy by none other than their label, Bayonet Records, during a fateful lunch. “It was actually what made me feel like they got me,” Heaven says. “They got the project.” If “hyperfolk” sounds like an oxymoron, that’s exactly the point. The band’s songs are often sparse, home-recorded, confessional, emotionally maximalist—and then abruptly silly. The goal is a kind of sonic slapstick: something jarringly off-kilter, a bit grotesque, maybe stupid, but true.

The auditory impact of New York feels almost tangible on the Wolfed EP, which sees Grumpy willing to experiment in ways they were once afraid to. The band surrounded itself with community, specifically, the self-inventing, gear-sharing, art-happens-on-your-floor New York DIY kind. Their peers aren’t just sonic influences; they’re roommates, studio mates, former bandmates, romantic partners, or all of the above. Heaven, who has also lived in Nashville and Chicago, puts it simply: “This is by far the most collaborative community of musicians I’ve been a part of.” Diego, who’s lived in the city since 2011, describes the pre-pandemic music scene as fragmented, with everything separated into “different scenes of bands that all felt in the periphery of one another,” they says But something shifted recently. “It feels really new, maybe just because I felt welcomed into some kind of version of this community for the first time.” They cite their time working at the Roulette in Brooklyn as a major source of inspiration: “I got to see a lot of things I never would have really been exposed to. It really changed the way I thought about what was possible.”

That ethos of possibility—of making room for the offbeat and the dissonant—has since come to define Grumpy’s creative rhythm. “The city being small and expensive and in many ways difficult to survive in necessitates that we learn how to share,” Heaven says. “Share studio spaces, share gear, share talents, share time.”

As a result of these shifts, 2024’s Wolfed feels like a reinvention not because it departs from Loser, but because it finally lands where Heaven first wanted it to go. Inspired by a love of theatricality, horror aesthetics, the strange intersection of folk lyricism and glitchy pop chaos, Wolfed wears its emotional intensity on its shredded sleeves. The songs are cleaner but weirder, more confident in their refusal to be palatable. The production took shape collaboratively—especially with Lane, who helped build the sound from the inside out—and reflected the sharper, campier, more fully embodied aesthetic that had taken root in the band’s downtime. (The band’s new dynamic, according to Heaven: “Lane, Diego, and Anya help me unlock the darkness and depth that I’m after, whether it’s in tone or production or visuals…and then Austin’s our voice of reasonnnn!”)

The group cites songs like “Saltlick” and “Beach Towel” as watershed moments, particularly due to the impact of Lane’s influence on both songs. “Lane brought a lot of cool that I was after,” Heaven says. “She is a huge part of the sound of ‘Saltlick.’ She made that song what it is.” Lane shakes her head, bringing attention to the unique drumline on the track, which was all Heaven—despite Heaven having no formal training in drum production. They made the beat by feel alone. Lane was struck by the carefree experimental spirit of it: “It’s not what I would have done, it’s not what Austin would’ve done… but you just, that was yours.” They never touched the beat again. Heaven seems quite tickled by the whole ordeal: “I have no clue about drums and beats, and so I make a lot of the wrong choices that I think are interesting,” they explain. “So I’m on purpose not learning. I refuse to learn!” Austin—who is, again, the drummer—breathes out a good-natured yet long-suffering sigh.

Then, there’s the devastatingly raw “Beach Towel,” which is this author’s personal favorite Grumpy track, for whatever that’s worth. The song is downright gorgeous, a Scout Niblett crooner peeled open to reveal the bleeding wounds underneath then scabbed over with odd bursts of static. Lane views the track as the “perfect sonic and lyrical encapsulation of where [Heaven] pivoted towards.” “Sometimes when we play it live, like, people kind of giggle at the lyrics, but then there’s kind of a moment of, like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ It’s so painful in what it’s expressing, but so goofy too.”

This, in essence, is Grumpy’s signature move: disarming you with humor, then gutting you with sincerity. Heaven excels at this in their lyricism, flipping from ridiculous to devastating on a dime. “I want people to laugh at the lyrics. I want people to laugh at the sounds too,” Heaven explains. “But the dark aesthetic of it all is because, to me, a lot of what I’m saying is really embarrassing. It’s almost like a humiliation thing—I’m trying to see how much I can expose myself.” And, in turn, expose their bandmates, too.

In the music industry’s perpetual search for an angle, Grumpy offers the kind of narrative that seems engineered for clickbait: a pseudo-polycule of exes make art about each other while cohabitating, commiserating, and collaborating. But what makes it extraordinary is the depth of their mutual care, and the way it’s made tangible, audible, in the music. “It does feel like a loving sacrifice at times that you guys are so willing to let me expose myself, which, you know, just happens to also expose you, for our art,” Heaven says. “I think it helps me push the boundary a little bit just to be like, ‘it’s okay. We’ve all felt this. We’ve all had this challenge.’ That freedom to expose ourselves with your support, ultimately, is a huge point of pride for me because I feel very loved. I feel supported.”

IT’S ONE THING TO WRITE a song about someone you love. It’s another to play it for them. It’s something else entirely to do so while sitting beside them, fresh from a breakup, pressing record on your voice memo app, and then harmonizing with them onstage, night after night, as the crowd sings along. But then there’s arguably the most uncomfortable thing of all: being the person the song is about, the bandmate who has to stand onstage and play guitar for their ex while they sing about how your relationship fell apart. And that’s kind of the point. The heartbreak is not ancillary to the music. It is the music, and the catharsis is collective.

Honestly, the whole thing feels a little unthinkable until you hear them describe it, until you sit in the presence of this strange, electric generosity that underpins Grumpy’s entire philosophy: love as art, art as love, and neither contingent on permanence. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. In fact, a lot of the time it really isn’t. “There are songs I don’t like to hear anymore,” Austin admits, the understatement hanging in the air like a cracked cymbal. But he also describes a kind of slow-release healing: “It starts being less about you. Like, I’m not that past version of myself anymore. And Heaven isn’t that past version of themselves anymore. So it’s like you’re floating farther and farther away from it.” He laughs, shakes his head. “It’s a… special kind of dissociation.”

Wolfed itself was recorded in a similar situation—a conundrum so intense it’s the indie-rock version of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Back in 2022, Heaven and Austin ended up finalizing their divorce a mere three days prior to the rest of the band showing up at the now-ex-couple’s Chicago house to spend over a week in constant close quarters, recording their new EP. Everyone agrees that the music helped to keep them sane during that time, as it gave them something else to focus on, but Austin and Heaven do seem to diverge a little as far as the overall experience goes: After talking me through the ordeal, Austin sighs, not humorless but not emotionless either, “I… wouldn’t recommend anyone ever doing that.” Heaven’s eyebrows furrow before they reply, ever-enthusiastic, “I kinda disagree! I would! Honestly, we had a pretty good time!” Lane shakes her head fondly as she watches it all unfold.

Then there’s the case of “knot,” a song on their upcoming Piebald EP. According to Heaven, the song “is about Lane” and about the day they broke up. “I wrote that song that day. I came downstairs, in some of the most pain I’ve ever been in, and say ‘Hey, I wrote this fire song.’” (“And what a great distillation of your vibe,” Lane says fondly). Playing the song for Lane, Heaven laid every ounce of heartbreak they were feeling at Lane’s feet—and because Heaven is Heaven, they also made sure to record the whole thing on a voice memo just in case they wanted to use it somewhere. And because Lane is Lane, her response was nothing other than: “Will you play that again a whole step lower?’”

Perhaps that might seem like a callous response to such a painful showing of vulnerability, but it was exactly what Heaven wanted and needed in that moment, and to this day, they view it as “a perfect example of how much Lane loves and gets me.” In the end, the final version of the song, the one that will be heard on Piebald, is made up of none other than those two takes—Heaven’s original heartbroken serenade and the moments-later result of Lane’s request for a pitched-down iteration—stacked on top of each other. The emotion in the track is rawer than you could possibly imagine, as it is quite literally a pair of voice memos documenting the immediate aftermath of a breakup. “The first time Heaven writes [a song about you], when they’ve just written it and you listen to them play it,” Lane confesses, “those are always some of the most emotional experiences of my entire life.”

There’s something startling in that vulnerability, even from a band that often trades in it. As Diego puts it, “I know how it feels to share that [song] with someone and have them kind of… grapple.” Their voice trails off, not with discomfort but reverence. Diego, notably, is the only member who hasn’t dated Heaven (“Not yet!” Heaven cracks), and in some ways functions as a mirror: empathetic, but unentangled. “I think, maybe in a way, I might be able to help be a conduit to you accessing some of those feelings and approaching them in different ways,” Diego offers. “Because I know all of you so well at this point now, too.”

It’s all a little bit uncanny, like some strange, heartwarming version of Ramona Flowers’ League of Evil Exes that none of us knew we wanted. I crack as much to Heaven, but they just nod in turn. “Honestly? Yeah. If you want to date me, you’re going to have to be pretty cool with the fact that, well, my relationship with my exes comes first,” Heaven says, not a hint of humor or irony in their tone, just guileless truth. “If anybody wants to be in my life, they better be supportive of the most important people in my life—which is my band and my exes, who are the same people.”

In other words, what holds Grumpy together—and what has always held Grumpy together—is not sound or structure or even romance, but a sort of mutual gravitational pull, held taut no matter what by a shared love of both music and each other. “The way you love me…” Heaven tells the band at one point, “the shape of our love is not the bottom line. It’s that our bond remains—that we can still share that love, redefine it, and keep this sense of family together, however it needs to change for us.”

WITH THE COMFORT OF THEIR merry band of exes around them, Heaven looks back on those four years of uncertainty (2020-2024) with a new perspective these days. “At the time, I was like, ‘I need to start a new project. This new music is a new sound,’” they recall. “But really, it was just doubt. I got it in my head that if we didn’t pop off immediately, we were stale, and I needed to start a new project. It was just self-doubt, and it was silly. Because the more I look into it, the more I see my favorite bands, they’re at it for years and years and years, and then one day it just takes off. And that’s what’s happening to us right now!” The whole table erupts into cheers.

With Grumpy entering a new era, and with greater success already visible on the horizon, there’s an electric excitement in the air—although a lot of it comes from Heaven just by nature of Heaven being Heaven. They are particularly excited by the prospect of breaking it big, in a way that very few admit, and even fewer actually mean: “Honestly, I do feel like I’m cut out for fame,” they say, apropos of nothing. Everyone else groans audibly. Austin facepalms. I feel like I’m watching a real-life sitcom. “Like, I genuinely enjoy self promotion and attention. I love social media! I love posting! Sign me up!”

Heaven seems to have figured out something a lot of artists never do: how to be honest without being precious. And, well… Heaven is really not precious about any of it. Like, impressively so. Maybe a little disconcertingly so. They broadcast their greatest sources of shame with the gleeful air of a ringleader, a comparison that does not escape them. “I do feel like a ringmaster, sometimes. It all just has such a circus element to me. Like, ‘All right, come in here and look at the, like, three boobed man! Don’t you want to see? Don’t you want to know about my exes? Come! Hark! Gawk at this freak show!” (Cue Austin’s amused, mock-appalled retort of “Are you calling us a freak show???”)

The Grumpy circus is officially in town, and it shows no signs of leaving anytime soon—their current docket is already overflowing with fresh material waiting to be released. Most immediately is Piebald, an EP titled after an old term for black-and-white animals, which continues down the road Wolfed took care to pave, leaning further into the band’s commitment to contrast: joy and grotesquerie, silliness and seriousness, cut and dry. The group stays largely mum on the subject, but Anya says that the EP “goes with the ‘Victorian truck stop’ kind of aesthetic, drawing a contrast with the more “fairytale theme” of Wolfed. “Wolfed and Piebald are, to me, a part one and a part two of a body of work,” Heaven explains. “They were all made together, these songs. Part of it being EPs is because we wanted to give that act one and act two of our re-emergence after four years away from music. We wanted to really flesh out this new sound.”

But today, there’s a new single, “Harmony”—a collaboration with experimental pop deconstructionist claire rousay and boundary-pushing duo Pink Must. This is just another in a growing list of impressive collabs under Grumpy’s belt; earlier this year, they worked alongside Sidney Gish and Precious Human on the single “Lonesome Ride,” and Heaven has sang harmonies for Zach Bryan (yes, that Zach Bryan). “Harmony” itself is, predictably, strange and tender and a little warped at the edges—a sonic postcard from the outer boroughs of poppy indietronica, stamped with three different names and none of the expected genre markings. The testimonials are precisely what one might expect from this trio of artists, and it’s glorious, like a dream blunt session trapped in a press release. Pink Must declares, “This song was scientifically engineered so that every individual element will be stuck in your head at all times.” rousay predicts the listening response will be “ya imma listen to that again,” and Heaven discusses how they bravely overcame their dislike of women in order to make the song happen (“Women are notoriously difficult to work with but these three were actually really chill”).

As for the future? More songs, more collaboration—first Sidney Gish, now claire rousay and Pink Must, and one day (Heaven hopes) Aldous Harding. (Aldous, if you’re reading this, please hit Grumpy up). Bayonet Records has given them blanket permission to be weird, which all five members are ecstatic about. “Things can go so wrong when signing with a label,” Heaven elaborates. “Bayonet’s support for all our weird choices is just a real lottery ticket kind of label for a band like us.” And, of course, Heaven harbors no worry about the trappings of success—and not just due to their aforementioned and self-proclaimed love for attention, either. “The bigger we get, the more success any of our projects find, the greater access we have to each other,” they say. If Grumpy reaches a critical mass, then they can leave their day jobs as opticians and waiters behind and devote all of their energy to the band. But it’s not even the music itself that makes this such an appealing prospect. As Heaven puts it: “The whole reason I’m doing any of this is because I want to hang out with my friends.”

Listen to “Harmony” below.

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].