Superheaven: 10 Years Away, But Never Out of Reach

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Superheaven are back. But they never really left.

The beloved Doylestown, Pennsylvania band once known as Daylight officially stepped away in 2016, after touring their sophomore album, Ours is Chrome, saying they wanted to pursue “things in our own personal lives.” For instance, bassist Joe Kane has been working as a carpenter since the break. But the band still popped up for one-offs here and there, to say nothing of co-guitarist/vocalists Taylor Madison and Jake Clarke starting the still-active Webbed Wing together. But now, Superheaven are really back, with an eponymous album.

Superheaven’s “final” show before their hiatus was June 30th, 2016. Now, 10 years after the release of Ours is Chrome, the band has returned with proof of concept that people want to hear more from them. During their hibernation, TikTok launched and became the dominating force in culture. Eight years into Superheaven’s 10-year break, the kids online glommed on to “Youngest Daughter,” a deep cut from the band’s 2013 debut Jar—placing them in the much-blogged about “shoegaze resurgence” among Gen Z. The buzz primed a new audience for Superheaven’s return, much to the chagrin of the thirty-somethings who remember the band’s heyday, like a beloved movie franchise getting the reboot treatment.

Any article about Superheaven now, unfortunately, has to reference this. But, thanks to how the music industry—or entertainment industry overall, really—works nowadays, it wasn’t exactly a winning lottery ticket, financially speaking. There was no immediate payout or giant check from TikTok at their front door. “We don’t drive Lexuses or anything like that,” Madison says. But going big on TikTok will still change things, even when the band members weren’t on the app themselves. New fans were checking out Superheaven online and getting into the first two records. Maybe they were even buying copies of the albums.

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Like any band mounting a comeback, the world Superheaven are returning to is different than the way they left it. Their fans from before are older, and so is the band. But Superheaven’s case is interesting, because they’re not just playing for the IPAs and folded-arms crowd. It’s not “An Evening With Superheaven at City Winery” yet, and that’s due, largely, to the fans who found them on social media. “We’re slowly seeing the crossover of people coming to the shows,” Madison says. “This tour we’ve got coming up is the biggest rooms in the U.S. we’ve ever headlined.”

Madison mentions that the band is seeing a payoff from online attention through this tour. Few bands from the 2010s emo and emo-adjacent bull market could say their comeback tour will be their biggest. The guys in Superheaven aren’t generating their self-worth as artists through their online listener numbers, but it helps when you’re booking a tour to know there are going to be enough people to justify booking larger venues. At the risk of sounding corny or overly saccharine about rock and roll changing a young person’s life, Madison and Clarke are aware that, yes, there is a new batch of young fans who discovered their older music and want more but might not know a ton about the genre Superheaven works out of. And that makes for a situation where the band could be the one that “changed everything” or unlocked something in a listener.

“It was like an avalanche of new fans and people gravitating towards [Jar] and then finding [Ours is Chrome],” Clarke says. “That turned into, ‘Let’s do a full record,’ and that’s a snapshot of 2025. And that’s why we’re here today—[to] have a record and have it to tour. I think, at any point, we probably could have written a record that we liked, but I don’t know if we would have put as much effort into it as we did. Not that we would have half-assed the record, but I think we definitely had some feeling of like, ‘Okay, we’ve got these new people that are paying attention—let’s rock them.’”

When it comes to the magic of live music, even Madison, who calls himself “the most jaded person alive,” has felt rejuvenated and motivated by his new fanbase. “It means more to them than it does some motherfucker that’s my age, you know what I mean?” he says. “They’re excited. It’s gonna impact them more if we put on a good show or have a nice interaction with them. Somebody that’s our age, or even a little younger, they might have a good night, but they’re gonna be like, ‘Alright, well, my feet kinda hurt. I’m ready to go home.’”

For Superheaven, there’s something freeing about coming back after their hiatus, too. Much has been said about bands struggling to make their second record—how you have your whole life to make the first one but maybe a year to make the second, amid the expectations of meeting or exceeding the hype surrounding your music. Superheaven felt that pressure after Jar. “Even when there were less eyes on us, making the second record felt like it was like we had the weight of the world on our shoulders,” Madison says. “And now I’m just like, ‘Who gives a fuck, man?’”

It feels purposeful that the album Superheaven came back with is eponymous. It’s a “Here we are, here’s what we sound like” statement: No posturing. When asked about influences, the band claims that they tried to focus on capturing their own sound rather than consciously inserting anything from other artists, in an attempt to reinvent their own wheels. They wanted to make an album of Superheaven songs, trying a little bit of synth here and there on the new record. But there aren’t any huge stylistic swings. One might read this as a criticism, but it’s praise: Superheaven sounds like a Superheaven album.

For all the people who found them as part of the so-called “shoegaze” revolution, they will get their fill of droning, mid-tempo distortion. The one-two punch of “Humans for Toys” and “Numb to What is Real” finds Madison and Clarke sharing lead vocal duties. And, much like your friend who puts on a tough-guy persona but is a softy deep down, there are hooks that downright poppy under the gain and pounding, like the Third Eye Blind-disguised “Cruel Times,” and moments for relatively quiet reflection, like during the gauzy “Conflicted Mood,” which serves as a palette cleanser between rounds of getting kicked in the teeth.

“You don’t do anything but for you and the other people you’re playing music with,” Madison says. “Otherwise, you’re just kidding yourself.” Blue Grape Music adopted that paean, too. Under different leadership, Superheaven might’ve been forced to go outside with a metal stick and wait for TikTok lightning to strike again, whether the result was authentically them or not. Superheaven is the band’s first release with Blue Grape, a label started by former Roadrunner Records A&R man Dave Rath and founder Cees Wessels.

Working with Blue Grape strengthened Superheaven’s clean slate and, much like how social media changed while they were on hiatus, their old label had gone through a period of transition to say the very least. Jar and Ours is Chrome were both put out by SideOneDummy, which, in 2017, suddenly laid off its entire staff save for a general manager. Speaking to Vice at the time, label co-founder Bill Armstrong called it “an unfortunate but necessary restructuring of the company.” In reality, the label had been losing money. It came to a point where the rug was pulled out from not only its staffers, but its robust stable of artists, turning from scene powerhouse to an unrecognizable shell practically overnight.

Clarke had been in touch with people at SideOneDummy intermittently since the band went on hiatus, but nothing about a new Superheaven record ever came up. They admit that Ours is Chrome might have under-delivered on what the label had wanted. SideOneDummy falling from grace and cheating its artists was the final nail. Rath’s history of working with bands like Basement and Turnstile opened up a dialogue of understanding between him and Superheaven. He also proved himself as a bit of an anti-suit. “He’s a very fair guy,” Clarke says. “I can’t say enough great things about working with them so far.”

Madison says that Superheaven aren’t interested in industry types either, so a guy like Rath, who allowed them to be themselves and focus on making their music, social media statistics be damned, was a welcome change. “You could tell when a motherfucker’s trying to just get in your pocket,” Madison continues. “And that’s their job, whatever, but we also don’t have to just tolerate or accept their presence, and I feel like Dave is not like that. He’s a pretty straight shooter.” Working closely with Rath and his metal background with Roadrunner—TikTok’s genre antithesis—made things clear: replicated virality was not the direction. No one could have predicted that “Youngest Daughter” would break out like it did. “It’s not even a single,” Madison says. “So, I don’t even think at any point we were like, ‘That’s the one, man.’”

Superheaven weren’t alone in this. The TikTok algorithm doesn’t seem to favor singles over deep cuts. Look at Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine,” which wasn’t a pre-release single from The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, but charted on the Hot 100; or “End of Beginning” by Djo, which took off online and made him one of the top-streamed global artists of 2024.

All of this is to say that Superheaven are afforded the luxury of being able to “ignore” that part of their past. Rath puts on his label hat when he needs the band to buckle down on a commitment, but, as they put it, he’s not forcing them into TikTok dances to tease new music to their community, or the fans have recently discovered them. Even if someone had tried to apply that pressure, it’s unlikely that the guys in Superheaven would have ever caved. When asked if there’s an obligation to add “Youngest Daughter” to the setlist, or to cater to new audiences, Madison is quick on the draw: “You can’t pressure us into doing anything if we really didn’t want to. But luckily, it is a pretty fun song to play live.”

Rath recognizes that “Youngest Daughter” just happened to be the one that the powers that be plucked out of obscurity. But it wasn’t all just pure luck—it’s a great song, and the band will admit that. But they will also admit that it’s not their best, nor their favorite song. They’re capable of writing better songs, and they feel like they’ve done that on Superheaven. And if people don’t resonate with the songs right now? Madison, for one, isn’t too worried. “They’re gonna find out in 10 years.”

Brendan Menapace is a writer based in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in Esquire, Stereogum, Vice, SPIN and more. He also has a newsletter called Snakes and Sparklers.

Superheaven: 10 Years Away, But Never Out of Reach

TikTok stardom might change some people, but the Doylestown rockers are who they’ve always been on their first studio album in a decade.