I got a chance to speak with Martin Jensen of Danish experimental rockers Heathe about their new album Control Your Soul’s Desire For Freedom, which is one of 2025’s most intriguing listening experiences. They talk about their many influences, the power of dissonance and repetition, creating art, and much more.
First off, where are you all from? How’d you get started as a band?
We started off in Aalborg, a small city in the north of Denmark. It all began with a demo tape I recorded over the course of a few days while I had a massive fever. It was never meant to be anything more than that, but I quickly got offered a few gigs. Curious to see what it would be like performing the material live, I asked a bunch of my close friends to join. For the first few years, the line-up changed constantly from show to show, depending on who was available. It’s only recently that we settled on a fixed formation, when we started working on this album back in 2020. That’s when we truly became a band.
Who would you say are some of your biggest influences?
Recently, we spoke about how one of the things that could maybe make this album stand out a little is that none of us really listen to metal and hard music that much anymore, and also have no idea how to play it. Personally, I am really into spiritual jazz from the ’60s and ’70s, different types of folk and religious music from around the world, improv, noise, psych, left field stuff.. We all share a big appreciation for outsider music as well.
Andreas is a movie score composer, Simon and Oskar have a band called Kogekunst, which sounds like Michael Bolton, Captain Beefheart, and Jackson 5 combined, Filip grew up on jazz and blues, Jonas does ambient stuff, and I had a few different punk and noise projects back in the day.
Initially, Swans were a big influence on the early works of the band, but I think that has gone a little on this album. It’s more about Lil Wayne, Deftones, Gnawa music, and Diana Ross now..
How would you Describe your sound, it’s a very unique approach to music. There’s almost something primal and folk to it.
I think a lot of it stems from us all having a big appreciation for sound and liking to nerd out over how sound can be shaped and manipulated.
Despite having a lot of folk influences, we don’t use that many traditional instruments, and if we do, it will go through some sort of modulation, that’s for sure.
We’re also just an eclectic bunch that likes all kinds of different music and each other, so when you throw that mix in a room with some instruments, the results are going to be all kinds of different things.
Normally, when people ask me, I just say it’s loud rock with some screaming because I can’t be fucked. No one wants to hear about your band anyway, I’m sorry.
Dissonance and repetition appear to be themes in your music. What draws you to these two specific concepts? Do you find there’s some “power” in repetition?
I’ve been fascinated with repetition for many years now, and I keep gravitating towards music that is somehow monolithic. Either through rhythmic repetitions or drones.
I think the way we work with dissonance and repetition has to do with building anticipation and shattering it again, invoking a state of trance to then create some unexpected progressions.
We usually agree to repeat a segment until we think people start to get bored, and then a bit more, and then we go off in another direction.
And dissonance just sounds much cooler and evil than resonance.. And again it’s about the contrasts – The beauty becomes more beautiful when it grows from a pile of disturbing dissonant mud.
Congrats on the new album ‘Control Your Soul’s Desire for Freedom’! It’s an intense ride. Is there a consensus favorite song from it?
THANKS!! We are very proud and happy… We haven’t talked about if we all agree on a favorite, so I’ll try and answer for everyone…
I think they all hold their own important place on the record, and I wouldn’t be without any of them. But if I were to point at one track that kind of sums up the album, I would go with “My Gods Destroy.”
“My Gods Destroy” is one of my favorite songs of the year. There’s just not much out there like it.
Oh, fun! Thanks!! Mine, too!
“My Gods Destroy” was the first track written for the album. The first demo was made back in 2019, even before we released our last album. It didn’t change much from the initial version – it didn’t have the melodic segment in the long instrumental part, and it didn’t have the choir. That came later, as Oskar from the band worked with an early rehearsal space recording. But the overall idea of combining something almost nu-metal sounding with a Tuareg-inspired groove has remained intact.
The lyrics are still just the placeholder lyrics. It always ends up like that. I’ll write some words while working with a demo, thinking they’ll get brushed up or changed later down the road, but it never happens. I’m an extremely lazy songwriter. But usually, with time, I begin to appreciate those quickly written stream-of-consciousness lyrics. I keep discovering different meanings to them, and that’s pretty fun..
What was the creative process like for the project?
We are not the kind of band that meets every Sunday to practice for a few hours. We’ll meet up 3–4–5 times a year for a few days and then work on the material, quite often not all of us, in a studio setting, patching the pieces together on a computer.
One of the songs on the album, “Valencia’s Next”, all the instruments and vocals were done by Oskar. We never worked on that recording collectively.
But yeah, someone comes with a demo, and then we try and play it together, and over time it will change as everyone takes ownership over the song, the more we work with it. It’s a slow process, sometimes frustrating. We have an abstract and not very efficient way of talking about the material, probably because none of us are super educated and we don’t really read music.
It’s been a massive upgrade, changing from being a group centered around one songwriter to working on the music collectively as a band. The music has much more a personality of its own now that everyone has contributed with a bit of themselves. I love this album because I love my friends whom I made it with.
With the intensity and length of your music, I can only imagine what it’s like performing these live. Is there cathartic release that comes from playing live for you all?
For sure, yes. Live performances have always been where Heathe really shines, I think. For us, it is a pretty physical and overwhelming experience, and I hope it also comes across to the audience.
This new material, however, some of which we’ve never performed live before, does require us to be a bit more present. It is more complex than the old stuff, so we’re not able to just space out into the noise. I think this upcoming streak of concerts is going to be a different kind of cathartic release, where we can hopefully enter a sort of collective focus rather than it being just a purely physical experience.
We say you have to be fearless to be a creative and put yourself out there, do you agree?
At some point, I gave up any other musical ambitions than the purely artistic ones, so when you stop thinking about what others might think, if anyone hears it at all, about money and all that, and the only one you really have to please is yourself, it becomes a little less frightening.
On this release, we’ve been combining some of the most awful clichés from stadium rock music, pretending to play afrobeat, and stealing from trap music. And if people don’t like it, there are luckily 10–20 more albums released every minute that they can listen to instead.
I wish more people didn’t care about industry standards and “making it.” The world is a different place now, and you have all the means to do whatever you want musically and no gatekeepers to keep you from doing it. Make weird shit and release it on SoundCloud. We need more of that, and less of whatever happens over at Spotify.
What’s next for you guys?
The birth of Control Your Soul’s… was a long and difficult one. We needed to try and find each other as a band and figure out how to compose collectively — and, luckily, we’re still trying to do that. Hopefully, we keep challenging and inspiring each other, and music will grow from that.
Right now, we’re looking forward to taking the songs to the stage and performing some shows in and around Denmark. Hopefully, next year, we’ll be performing some shows around Europe, too, if someone wants to pay us to do so.
We’re also working on an exclusive China-only release of the album, together with a Chinese label.
Stream Control Your Soul’s Desire For Freedom on Bandcamp now.
