Hei’An evolves.
After a debut album that opened many doors for them in 2022, the band composed of Matic Blagonic (clean vocals), Aljaz Novak (distorted vocals), Matevz Pocic (guitar), Peter Smrdel (bass), and Gaj Bostic (drums) is back with its second album, three years after Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye.
The album opens with samples from Aberration, a composition that starts off ethereal but quickly takes a darker turn, picking up a trap beat before cybernetic vocals kick in. The intensity slowly builds before cutting off, and then My Harness offers up the first energetic riffs accompanied by Matic‘s voice, which colors them with its sweetness, creating a heady contrast before Aljaz takes over with his screams. The track literally bursts into flames to join What a Shame, which follows with the same modern approach, but the vocalists unite to make it a rather vindictive track at times, enhancing the power of a jerky rhythm before moving on to To Let You Down and its mysterious sounds. The vocal duo once again works wonders during the most violent moments, where the harmonics multiply, but we also note the fury of the break, even in the instrumental section. Dearest then surprises us with its technicality and marked prog influences. The rest of the track remains relatively calm, yet still offers some impressive passages, as does Beneath the Sinking Moon, which perfectly manages its rhythm to captivate our attention at every moment. We should note the power of this futuristic final before the return of the samples on Undertow, whose atmosphere is calm at first, but the power quickly returns to emphasize the contrast before unleashing itself and making Make Me Want to Leave You one of the most oppressive tracks on the album. Clean vocals dominate this composition, leaving room for a few choruses and other screams, then Liberated offers us a much more danceable, almost intoxicating approach, as it is once again led by clear vocals with a few more violent appearances. The end of the album takes shape with What Do You Have to Save?, which starts off calmly, then becomes much more energetic and carries us away before cutting off abruptly.
Adopting new influences, Hei’An has managed to reinvent itself while continuing with a modern and catchy approach. If you like current Metalcore, you’ll be hooked on Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye in no time!
75/100
A few questions to Matic Blagonic, guitarist and vocalist for the band Hei’An for the release of the band’s second album, Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye.
Hello and first of all, thank you very much for your time! How would you introduce the band Hei’An without using the musical labels, such as “Metalcore” or “Post-Metal”?
Matic Blagonic (vocals/guitar): Hey there! Thank you so much for having me! And that’s an interesting question! Well, our music is generally quite dark but always has a sprinkle of hope hidden in there, so maybe the phrase “a dark cloud with a silver lining” might be a cool non-musical label to introduce us? 🙂
The name Hei’An reminds me of the Japanese, meaning “peace”. Is this your inspiration for your name, or is it anything else? How do you link the name Hei’An to the music you play?
Matic: Not quite, but that’s a very valid guess and not super far from the truth! So, long story short: I had a lot of trouble finding a name for my project back when I first started working on the idea of what would soon later become Hei’An, and I remember at some point me and Aljaz (the band’s second vocalist, ed.) – and that was long before he became involved with the project itself – were brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other. I wanted the name to be very unique, short, catchy, to mean something to me, and to “describe” the music I was writing in a way. I had a lot of different ideas but I don’t want to even share them here because one was more awful than the other. In any case, at some point Aljaz suggested the name Hei’An and explained what it meant to me, and I immediately fell in love with it, it just felt right and I went with my gut. You see, in the Chinese language, “Hei An” means “darkness” but it can be translated in a few subtly different ways like “peaceful darkness”, “ominous darkness” etc., and it felt like a perfect way to describe the music I was writing at the time. I went for the alternate spelling, so Hei’An because it just looked better stylistically to me, stood out more and thus better fulfilled my “very unique” criteria I mentioned earlier. Good thing Aljaz studied sinology at University. In terms of how I’d link the name Hei’An with our music in a more concrete way – specifically the translation “peaceful darkness” describes the music that I write as a songwriter and that we write as a band amazingly well because I feel like Hei’An tracks are always at least somewhat dark, either in a sonical or a lyrical sense or both, and my lyrical and conceptual ideas specifically always come from “the darker parts of my mind” if that makes sense. But despite all that, you can still hear and feel a sense of peace, comfort and even hopefulness in Hei’An music, so the meaning of the name truly ties in well with the music itself in my opinion.
In September, Hei’An will release its second full-length, called Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye. How do you feel about it? Do you already have any feedback?
Matic: We are mostly incredibly proud! We co-produced this record ourselves, allowed ourselves to be much bolder than before, we feel like we truly did everything we could to improve our songwriting, performances, production quality etc. and we feel like we’ve grown a lot in all those areas since our first album, so we truly are incredibly proud of this new record and we feel like a lot of people out there might really enjoy it if they gave it a spin! We did show the full album to some people already, obviously our whole team has heard it more than once, and we’ve been showing parts of it to the people closest to us, and pretty much all the reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. The responses to the singles have also been amazing so far, so we’re incredibly excited to see where this album could potentially take us in the long run.
How would you sum Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye’s identity up in only three words?
Matic: Frustrated, desperate, yet hopeful.
How did the creation process happen in the band? Were there any differences or evolutions compared to the previous releases?
Matic: The entire creation process of this album was actually substantially different from anything we’ve done before. I wrote all of the songs for the first record just with my acoustic guitar and my voice and we then later arranged them together to become “Metal songs”, whereas with this record, I actually started the writing process for all of the songs with my “producer hat” on. I opened up my DAW, played around with various synth sounds, bass sounds, e-drums, samples etc. and just spent hours and hours creating little demo ideas. When I landed on one that made me feel something “special”, I started adding guitars, bass and drums to it, arranged it a bit, and only then started writing lyrics and adding the vocals. The rest of the band was also much more involved in the writing process (right after I completed those “early steps” myself) which resulted in a much more fun record to play instrumentally and gave this album a special layer of subtle complexity and nuance that truly brought the songs to a whole other level. We also recorded Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye in a different studio, worked with a whole different team (apart from Randy who co-produced it with us, we already worked with him on imago), so the entire recording and production process was completely different than ever before for us. This time we didn’t have one producer who did absolutely everything (even the editing, mixing and mastering), but we had different people doing different things that they specifically specialize in, “as one should” or “as the big boys do it” if you will, which made the entire production process of this album that much more exciting and interesting for us. And I feel like that sense of novelty led to the album turning out to be pretty unique and distinct, yet familiar in the end, which is something I personally love very much about it. So yes, our process evolved a lot compared to the past, but it felt right for this album and we are more than happy with the result.
The band’s sound is made of Post-Metal’s quietness, Progressive Metal’s complexity and Metalcore’s raw energy, but I hear more modern elements now, like on the first song Aberration or Dearest, which bands would you quote as your main influences? Did your influences evolve with time?
Matic: Yeah, we tend to mix a lot of elements from a lot of different musical styles in our music, but for what we are doing right now, we all agree that Post-Metalcore or even just Metalcore would be the best way to describe it. But of course, as you pointed out, we also still drive a lot of inspiration from Post-Metal and Progressive Metal, but lately we’ve been more and more inspired by artists outside of the Metal genre umbrella and by artists who bring those elements into a Metal(core) context. With the first album, I remember I already wanted to “go poppier” on some spots or to add a lot more electronic stuff to some parts etc., but I always stopped myself and said to myself something like “no, Matic, you can’t do this, this is METAL, if you do sh*t like this you’ll only attract haters and get 0 fans”, and as you can see, it was a pretty toxic mentality that I had and needed a bit of time to grow out of. But with Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye (and beyond) I really decided I want to feel 100% free when I’m writing my music and don’t want to feel like “I can’t write something out of fear of being judged” anymore. As a result, this new album feels even more genuine to me, and arguably way more “fresh”, if you know what I mean. In terms of specific influences, the most obvious ones right now are other modern Metalcore bands like Bring Me The Horizon, Architects, Dayseeker, Sleep Token, I Prevail etc., but since we all listen to so much different stuff the influences definitely don’t end up here. For the proggier aspects of the record I’d definitely cite bands like TesseracT, Leprous, Intervals, Their Dogs Were Astronauts etc. as influences. But there aren’t really all that many prog elements on the record and they’re mostly very subtle apart from those few super prominent and “super proggy” ones in a couple of tracks. Since you mentioned Post-Metal, this album is obviously a lot less “directly” influenced by that genre than our first album, but a lot of the harmonic structures, ambient guitars, ambient synths etc. were still very strongly inspired by bands like Alcest, Deafheaven, Together to the Stars etc., they were just arranged “into” the songs in a more subtle way than we used to do in the past. We also have a lot of super heavy segments on this record, like almost every song has at least one breakdown, which is definitely not something we’d do on “imago”. We all started listening to a lot of really heavy Metalcore and/or Deathcore more lately, so bands like Architects (specific songs), Spiritbox (specific songs), Whitechapel, Lorna Shore, Humanity’s Last Breath etc. for sure inspired a lot of that stuff. But while we went heavier than ever before with this record, we also simultaneously went poppier and catchier than ever before, generally speaking. We’ve been listening to more and more pop and electronic music lately, most notably myself. I’ve been really digging artists like Jennie (her recent solo album Ruby is actually one of my favorite albums I’ve ever heard in my life), Post Malone, Skrillex, Diplo, Blackpink, Gesaffelstein, Charli XCX, A. G. Cook, Aloboi etc. lately, so their influence for sure made its way onto our new album as well in various different subtle ways. All our influences most definitely involve with time, I personally often obsess over a song or an album I had just discovered for several days, weeks or even months in a row, and then find a new one to obsess over, while of course always regularly returning to those that stood out to me the most, so my music taste – and thus, my writing style – is ever evolving, so because of all that, you can never really know what the next Hei’An record is truly going to sound like. But I feel like I / we still do have a very unique way of blending all of this together, so that anything I / we write still sounds “very much Hei’An”, even when we take it in a “new” direction, if that makes sense.
Do you have a favorite song on Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye? Or maybe the hardest one to achieve for the album.
Matic: That’s a tough one.. I believe the boys in the band have cited To Let You Down, What a Shame and Make Me Want to Leave You as their personal favorites, but my personal favorite would probably be What Do You Have to Save?. I mean, I LOVE all the songs on the album, I wouldn’t put them on it and release them if I didn’t, but What Do You Have to Save? really stands out to me a tiny bit more than the rest, I guess. I just feel like the flow, continuity and pacing of that song are better than anything I’d ever written before, it’s catchy in all segments of it, it’s emotional as hell, it feels extremely vulnerable at some points yet larger than life at others, I’m incredibly proud of the lyrics, of all of our performances in it.. It just feels like a very important song for us, and one that ties the whole album together in a very thought-provoking way, I think. And for this record, none of the songs were “hard” to put together.. It was a long journey with countless steps for each and every one of them, but in the end, they all came together naturally and evolved into what they are today almost as if they had a will of their own, in a very good way, I hope.
Where do you find your inspiration to create music?
Matic: It depends, really. In terms of instrumentation, arrangements and production, we get inspired by other artists we like (from all those different genres and styles that I mentioned earlier). For this record in particular, a big source of inspiration was just playing around with synth sounds, samples, loops etc. I would find a cool synth sound that I really, really liked, tried to write a catchy melody or something with it, made a little loop with it and added a beat and some other elements, and the songs sort of started from there. So it felt a lot like just “playing around and seeing what works”, but in a methodical and deliberate way. When it comes to lyrical themes and concepts, that’s a bit of a different story, though. I always write lyrics based on my own experiences and thoughts, like most other songwriters out there I guess. With the first record we had a whole concept and story going on in a way, and while we didn’t with this one, the lyrical themes of all the songs on the new album still kind of follow a similar common thread. I tried to really look outward a bit more with this one instead of being purely introspective all throughout, and I really like the fact that I got to explore some lyrical things I haven’t quite touched on before here. I was also a lot more specific and literal in my writing so that the messages of the songs are hopefully a bit “clearer” than ever before. The main “inspirations” here were my sexuality (I’m bisexual and have been in a same-sex relationship with our harsh vocalist Aljaz for several years now) and my struggles with hate, rejection and bigotry because of it, a big theme was also my ongoing fight with MS (multiple sclerosis) which I was diagnosed with a few years ago, after our first record had already been released, and another big theme and source of inspiration on this record was my “existential crisis” so to speak, and my disappointment in humanity and where this world seems to be heading in general. I always like to be hopeful in my writing, though, that’s why I’m trying to “kiss my ghosts goodbye” with this record instead of “letting them haunt me forever”, so this pursuit of personal catharsis is always the main general motivator for writing more stuff I guess.
Do you think you improved yourself as a musician/songwriter with this new record?
Matic: Definitely! We’ve all been working really hard on improving our craft since the first album, and I feel like we’ve all grown as musicians in terms of technique and performance. I know I really did work on my vocals a LOT in order to improve as much as I could, and I really think we all improved a lot and I’m super proud of us for that. Of course, there’s still a long way to go and we all want to improve more and more and more, but that’s just part of this journey we all love so much, so we’ll definitely keep doing our best to get better and better at our individual instruments over time. I’m not saying we’re the best musicians in the world, far from it, but we are definitely working hard at trying to improve as much as we can over time. We’ve also grown a lot as a band, we clicked immediately back when we formed this band already, but now we’re at a point where we understand each other’s musical and creative identities that much more and our workflow has been smoother than ever before lately. As songwriters, we started to understand the subtle genius of simplicity more and more, although we still have a long way to go. We realized that a lot of the time, a simple but amazing part in a song will often have a much bigger emotional impact than a super complex one (not always, but very often for sure), and we realized it really is an art to keep something simple on the outside yet have it still have nuance and refinement and “accessible complexity” if that makes sense. And I feel like we’ve grown a lot in that area of our writing. Again, we still feel like we have a very long way to go, and we are doing our best to improve with every song we write, but I do strongly feel that we have grown at least a bit since the first album. And I – as the lyrics and top-line melody writer – have also been working hard at making my lyrics more memorable and hard-hitting, while making them even more direct and genuine, and to make my vocal melodies even more memorable, catchy and impactful, and I feel like I’ve improved in that area as well. Listening to more and more Pop actually helped a lot with this, as a lot of pop artists truly understand melody, pacing and storytelling arguably better than anyone else, so analyzing what they’re doing and trying to do it myself but with a Hei’An spin on it really elevated my songwriting a lot, I think. But again, we live and learn, so I hope each record we release will be an improvement from the previous one. I guess time will tell if we’ve managed to do that as a band or not, but we’ll definitely keep pushing.
I never had the opportunity to attend a Hei’An show yet, how do you live a live concert from your point of view? Do you have some pre-show or post-show routine?
Matic: Shows are one of our favorite aspects of this industry. Ever since we were little kids, we all dreamt of hitting the stage and playing our music in front of as many people as we can, and that still is – and likely always will be – one of our biggest “goals” if not our single biggest “goal” as a band. We all truly love performing live and feel incredibly “at home” on stage, if that makes sense. We haven’t had a “proper 1-month+ long tour” with Hei’An quite yet, but almost all the shows and festival appearances that we did have so far (and there were quite a few great ones considering how “young” this band is, which is something we’ll always be eternally grateful for) we remember very fondly. My personal favorite moment ever when it comes to live shows is when I sing something and I can see and hear at least the first few rows (if not more) of the audience singing their hearts out with me. That’s just the most rewarding moment ever for me, as I feel like we truly managed to emotionally touch some people, and at that moment, I feel the most connected with our fans. It’s them we want to cater to live, not just us anyway, so I feel like moments like these are kind of the whole point. And these moments hit the same whether it’s just 20 people in a super small club, or a bunch of people when we play a big festival stage, it doesn’t matter. When I see somebody in the audience singing their heart out, crying and having a little moment with us, I always think to myself “ok, THIS is why we do it”, it’s just the most magical thing ever for me. I remember one time when we played in Czechia, and there was this guy in the audience in a wheelchair, and in spite of that, he was partying, moshing, dancing, singing, moving around, he even came right to the stage and gave us all high fives.. That’s a moment I’ll never forget, I still get misty-eyed every time I even think of it. So yeah, I’d say Hei’An shows are an emotional rollercoaster, or at least we do our very best to make them that, both for us and, most of all, for the audience. In terms of pre-show and post-show routines.. We don’t really have a super specific pre-show routine. We all just warm up as well as we can, I personally do a bunch of vocal warmups and also a bunch of stretches, we all drink a lot of water, maybe have a beer or a shot (other than that, we really don’t like to drink alcohol before shows so we can really put on the best performance we possibly can, which being drunk would surely impair), and we always do a little group hug and wish each other a successful gig before walking on stage. As far as post-show rituals go.. We are all big party animals, so we sure love to celebrate after a gig, so that’s when we have more than just “one” beer or shot haha.
What is coming next for Hei’An? Maybe some shows, any tour coming?
Matic: We have a lot of plans for the future, yes. We are already writing a bunch of new material and making some loose plans for the next album, that’s a more “long term” plan, though. We are playing around with the idea of maybe doing and releasing some Electronic remixes of some of the songs from Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye, but we can’t really announce anything yet – we do really want to do it, though. And in terms of live activity, we have our 2-day Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye release festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia in October – we are soooo looking forward to that, as we’ll be returning to the stage after quite a bit, we have 2 amazing openers on each night, so 4 absolutely fantastic bands total opening for us, we are headlining both nights and have 2 different sets (the first night is a Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye front-to-back set, and the second night we have a very special set planned with a few cool surprises), we’ll have a food truck, a special Hei’An beer.. It’ll be AWESOME, we are soooo stoked for this! And in terms of other live activity, we are working on some festival bookings for 2026 and are actually in the process of booking a tour with some other bands, we can’t reveal much more yet, though. What we can say is this: we have a lot of live stuff in the works for 2026 and beyond, and if everything goes well (wish us luck!), we’ll be performing live quite a bit. Hopefully you can catch us live sometime soon as well! 🙂
On the previous album imago, you had three guests, but not a single one on Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye. Are you still open to collaborations? If yes, with who would you like to collaborate in the future?
Matic: Nice catch! Yes, of course we are still very open to collaborations, and are looking into some options for future releases, but for Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye, we decided against it. I mean, at first, we wanted to have a feature or two, and we did reach out to a few people early on in the process but it just didn’t work out, mainly because of schedule restrictions, but we very quickly decided we actually DON’T want to have a feature on this record, and the reason for this is very simple. This album kind of feels “even more ours” than the previous one – we produced a big chunk of this one ourselves, we really came together as a band more and the band was way more involved in the writing than with “imago”, we really called all the shots and in a way put even more of “ourselves” into these songs than before etc., and for all of these reasons, we felt like “forcing” a feature or two onto this album just for the sake of it (and not because any songs would be “calling for it”) would make it “less ours” if that makes sense. But of course, for the future, we are VERY open for collaborations, as long as they feel natural and are not “forced” at all! So I’m 100% sure we’ll be collaborating with more artists in the future, we all love the idea of that! In terms of who exactly we’d like to collaborate with.. The answer for that depends on how big we allow ourselves to dream, as a lot of our “dream features” are waaaay bigger artists than we are right now. One idea I really love is getting a feature by an artist that is NOT from the Metal world at all, and that would seem like “a very weird combination that might not fit at all with our style” but make it actually fit and sound amazing! A cool example would be AmEN! by Bring Me The Horizon where they featured Daryl from Glassjaw and Lil Uzi Vert. When I first saw that, I was like “what an odd combo, how the hell is this song gonna even sound?” and then it ended up being an absolute BANGER. I’d love to do something like that with Hei’An some day – to have a “weird combo” kind of feature on a song, but still make the song work SUPER well and make it super unique and interesting. Who exactly that feature might end up being? I guess we’ll see when we get there.
How is the Metal scene in Slovenia, your country? What about the French Metal scene, are there any bands you know and like?
Matic: The metal scene in Slovenia is surprisingly rich and vibrant, actually, considering how small the country is. We have a ton of Metal shows by both local and foreign bands (big and small) all year round, we have a loooooot of metal bands that originate from here (some are actually very well established and respected in the international metal community as well, most notably Within Destruction, Noctiferia etc.) so I’d say the scene is very “healthy”. We also have a lot of great festivals here – the most famous one that’s operating in Slovenia would probably be Tolminator, which is located at the same spot where MetalDays used to be, by the beautiful Soca river in Tolmin. It’s organized by our good friends Dirty Skunks and they’re absolutely KILLING it in putting Slovenia on the map for the international Metal community right now! The only “downside” to the Slovenian Metal scene, in my opinion, would be that more “modern” Metal genres like Metalcore, Deathcore etc. seem to be slightly less listened to than more traditional and extreme metal subgenres, and we also don’t have that many Metalcore bands here (at least compared to how many Black Metal bands, Death Metal bands etc. we have – which are also AWESOME by the way!), but even that is slowly changing a bit, and we’re very glad to see it. So yeah, the Slovenian Metal scene is great! 🙂
Oh yes, there’s a bunch of French metal bands we absolutely love, and from different metal subgenres as well! Alcest have a very special place in all of our hearts, and they influenced our first album quite a bit as well. I keep crying my eyes out every time I see them live, in the best possible way. Igorrr would be another one we all love – everything they release is just so “fresh” and unique and scratches an itch in our brains just right, Gautier is an absolute musical genius. Landmvrks are also absolutely incredible – haven’t seen them live yet, but they are definitely one of the best European metalcore bands out there right now in our opinion. Novelists are also insanely good – we’ve all had their most recent album Coda on repeat since it came out. And I’m sure there are many more, these are just the first few I thought of off the top of my head! So the French Metal scene seems INCREDIBLE to us, at least from the outside!
If I ask you to create a poster with Hei’An as headliner and three other bands for the release of Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye, which bands would you like to play with? Even unrealistic answers are accepted.
Matic: Well, if we can really go “completely unrealistic” for the stage of our career we’re at right now, I’d say Bring Me The Horizon and Bad Omens, and then Skrillex for the afterparty. Of course, all of these artists are f*cking MASSIVE, so we can only dream that we can reach that high of a stage some day – we know it’s “unrealistic”, but one can always dream, and we are definitely working as hard as we can to get as big as we possibly can some day – will we ever get THAT big? I guess only time will tell, but even if we don’t, no worries – the most important thing for us is to keep making music we love and trying to spread a sprinkle of hope into the world, to anybody who is willing to listen, and we are 100% fine with just that, at its core. But we already do have some openers for our Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye release shows, and we are extremely happy with the openers we managed to get (even if it’s not Bring Me The Horizon haha) 🙂
Last and funny question: which dish would you compare Hei’An’s music with?
Matic: That is a funny one haha.. I’d say maybe “goveja juha s parmezanom” – beef soup with Parmigiano. “Goveja juha” (a clear soup made with beef and vegetables) is a very traditional Slovenian dish we all know and love here, and the version with added Parmigiano cheese can only be found in the Istrian / Coastal region of Slovenia (as far as I’m aware of), where most of us in the band are originally from. It might seem like kind of a “weird combination” at first (I know it does to a lot of people here who have never had it before), but when you try it, it just works, and it’s soooo good and soooo comforting.. And since we blend a lot of different styles and genres with Hei’An, which might seem “weird” at first glance, but we do our best to make it work and make it sound as good as we’re personally able to, so I feel like “goveja juha s parmezanom” might be an AMAZING dish to represent what Hei’An is about. 😉
That was the last question for me, so thank you very much for your time and your music, last words are yours!
Matic: Thank YOU so much for having me and for all the love and support you’ve shown for our music! The last thing I’d like to add for now is the following: Dear Acta Infernalis readers! Thank you so much for reading through this interview – if you’ve made it this far, you’re a real one! I can only hope that you’ll enjoy listening to our new album Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye at least half as much as we’ve enjoyed making it! Lovelovelove! <3