The Helio Sequence: The Helio Sequence
A veteran band releasing a self-titled album is one of the more direct statements of purpose in rock music: This new sound, this is our identity now.
Despite an impressive run of albums, sometimes a signature style can come to define a band’s own boundaries. Some bands remain there, some mistakenly take on too-drastic changes, others recapture their essence via expansion and experimentation. For The Helio Sequence, in deliberately confronting those boundaries, a new alchemy is born. And that self-titled record becomes their best work yet.
The Helio Sequence has always sounded bigger than a duo, but on the band’s sixth album, Brandon Summers (guitars/vocals) and Benjamin Weikel (keyboards/drums) leave nothing hiding in the shadows, stretching beyond their prior albums in bold new strokes. The core remains—endlessly intertwining guitars, drums and keyboards—but there’s a palpable thrill in how Summers and Weikel approach and recombine these elements.
“Oh, I’m looking for a new direction / Oh, I’m looking for another way,” sings Summers on the opening “Battle Lines,” introducing the album’s in-the-moment spirit and conveying a sense of openness and yearning that remains throughout.
The Helio Sequence is the result of in-studio brainstorming, a self-imposed challenge to create as much new music as they could in one month. The duo came up with 26 finished songs last May, and from those demos picked the 10 they’d record. The tactic proved to be a breakthrough. Rather than getting buried in the studio, tinkering and obsessing over minutiae, Summers and Weikel pushed unconventional ideas to the forefront and let them come to rest there, coloring in the rest later.
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