ON THE RISE
Heatstroke is the perfect name for a band whose first album, Empire Statement, is hot, kick-butt rock from tracks one through 11, because rock is the beating heart of Heatstroke.
The single they chose to promote the album, “Times Square Claire,” is what they regard as the least rock of the tracks.
“We chose that song because it’s a song that we think can speak to the broadest possible audience,” said Troy Kirkwood, drummer and one of two founding members.
Orion Anderson, lead vocals, is the other founder. Daniel Beaton is the lead guitarist and Hunter Larabie is on bass guitar.
“Times Square Claire,” said Troy, “is a catchy song and it’s got an important story, as does the whole album.”
Orion called it the most poppy track on the album. He said the thought was that it might draw some listeners who might not otherwise make rock their first choice.
“But it can also expand on the actual rock scene and help it to grow a little more, especially with the way that music is going these days — more toward the rap and the EDM style of stuff that …”
“That we’re gonna stay as far away from as possible,” said Troy, finishing Orion’s thought. The rest of the band laughed their approval.
The poppiest on the album it may be, but it’s got a whole lot of rock, with the kind of driving guitar, rhythm and drum work rock fans want.
And Orion knows how to sing, whether it’s belting out lyrics in the hard rock tracks or putting out a soft flow in the album’s ballads, “Central Park” and “Sail Me Away.”
The album tells the story of a young man growing up in New York City. Except for the first track, “Empire Statement Overture,” and the last, “Sail Me Away,” the song titles are pegged to locations in the city — “Brownsville,” “Coney Island,” “Broadway,” “Times Square Claire,” “Brooklyn,” “Staten Island Ferry,” “Statue of Liberty,” “Concrete Jungle (Subway Station),” and “Central Park.”
The album is a life, Jacey Finn’s, who is the main character, said Troy.
“It’s just what life is like growing up in New York City and the pressures that you face and the temptations that you better avoid,” he said.
Speaking to the “statement” that’s in the album title, he said, “And, yeah, the statement is just see how you make your own destiny. Right? See how you can handle what you’re thrown.”
“Times Square Claire” is about the day Jacey sees Claire, who is hooking in the city’s Times Square.
Saw you standing across the street
Claire my poor heart melted
Don’t have to believe in love at first sight
But if you did I felt it
Just a Brooklyn teenage boy
Too cautious to say hello
“Jacey meets prostitute, falls ignorantly falls in love with her, not knowing what a prostitute is, but to the wider audience who isn’t following the story, it’s just another love song that they can listen to and relate to in that certain way,” said Hunter.
“We wrote it with that in mind, that she was a prostitute,” said Troy, “but it doesn’t have to be that because, really, when I first wrote the song, it was about my first relationship, my first heartbreak, but, you know, musicians find maniacal ways to change that around.”
The album is a fun piece of rock literature. Troy said it can be taken as a movie or as a play.
For Heatstroke, rock is the language of art. In its official bio, the band lists its influences as The Who, Sam Cooke, Humble Pie, the Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin and Metallica, to which Daniel adds a personal influence, Queen’s Brian May.
Even the ballads feature some killer guitar riffs from Daniel, and “Sail Me Away” alternates between balladic passages and hard rock in its seven-minute run.
The band calls Sudbury, Canada, home. The four members have been together since 2021. They are just getting started.
They expressed their admiration and gratitude for their producer, Brent Wohlberg.
“It would be brutal if we did this and didn’t give a shout-out to our producer and how he really turned us from kind of a mediocre garage band into a really good sounding band.”
Hunter said they have a lot of songs ready to record in future projects, songs that they are already playing live.
Their next gig is opening for the Fortunate Losers, a popular Ontario band, at Sudbury’s Townhouse Tavern on November 25.
Troy said that performing at larger venues is a dream, even though “I feel most at home in the studio.”
“But the shows are getting more and more fun for all of us, and the bigger they get, the more fun they are.”
Asked where they want to go with their music, Daniel said, “We’re going, the base idea is, all the way.”
Daniel wrote the final song on the album, “Sail Me Away.” He wrote it before the group formed, and it wasn’t originally part of the story, but it fits as the end of a narrative about a young man’s destiny.
The final lines could also be talking about Heatstroke:
I embark on this journey
Not knowing what’s in store
Sail me away
It’s time to open another door
See where destiny takes Heatstroke. Stay connected on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
ON THE RISE
As Belle & Sebastian share their buoyant 2026 Scotland World Cup anthem ‘It Only Takes One Lion’, frontman Stuart Murdoch has spoken to NME about capturing the feeling back home and his hopes for the team since childhood.
Released today (Tuesday June 2), the Scottish indie heroes’ bid for their nation’s tournament anthem was written after the team’s surprise 4-2 qualifying win against Denmark.
“I felt like we were watching history in the moment, like the hand of God from the old National Lottery adverts was pointing at us,” Murdoch told NME about that game-changing victory. “It was meant to be. Scotland aren’t a terrific team and Denmark are better, but it just felt that day that Scotland were destined to win. Three out of the four goals were things of beauty.”
Produced by and co-written with Pete Ferguson and premiered at the band’s recent London Royal Albert Hall show as part of the anniversary tour for their classic first two albums ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, the soaring song is intrinsically Belle & Sebastian as it morphs from a hymn to a an orchestral disco jam as Murdoch sings of a nation’s hopes and his own boyhood dreams.
NME spoke to Murdoch from the band’s North American tour, where we found him in a graveyard in Texas. “I was just looking for a park because Austin is a pretty scary place downtown now, so I’ve ended up in the Texas Cemetery,” he shared via Zoom.
Was there anyone famous buried there?
“I was looking around and I found the founder of Austin City Limits, which is pretty cool as that’s where we’re playing tonight. I’m looking at one now and it just says, ‘Martin: he loved the law’. Then underneath it says, ‘Billie Louise: she loved the lawyer’.”
We joke that there’s the opening to a Belle & Sebastian song if there ever there was one. “It’s great! It’s given me inspiration.”
For now, read the rest of interview with Murdoch below as he tells us about Scotland’s chances, 30 years of hurt, if fans will be singing it at the top of their lungs in Canada, the US and Mexico this summer, and what’s next for the band.
NME: Hello Stuart. Here we are with ‘It Only Takes One Lion’ Who needs three?
Stuart Murdoch: “Who needs three? Good question. I wouldn’t know!”
What’s the mood been like in Scotland since you qualified?
“It’s funny. I’ve noticed this everywhere: with the World Cup there’s a mixture of cynicism and anticipation. When the actual tournament starts, everyone will get excited about it. Because of FIFA, the peace prize, the ticket prices, people seem quite down about it. I found that in Mexico. They were quite fed up with the general hype about it. I’m in the States just now and you shouldn’t believe all the hype: people are people. The States are just as ‘great’ as ever. We love coming here, we love the cities. The general sense of North American optimism will make for a good tournament.”
“With Scotland though, people will definitely be excited about it. You have to understand, it’s been 30 years since Scotland qualified so I think everybody and their dog has written a song for the team.”
How do you meet the challenge of penning a World Cup anthem, when there have been so many legendary bangers and absolutely shite duds?
“I never planned it. I woke up with a tune in my head and a feeling. That’s the way it should always be for songs. I couldn’t control myself and it was quite straight-forward. I wrote this initial bit about how I felt about the current World Cup team and the qualifying game. It was more introspective.
“When it starts off with, ‘The days are dark and long…’, it’s just my general feeling about football. I’ve been going to see my own team quite a lot recently. It’s my little anthem for how I feel about football and following Scotland for the last 50 years, just the ups and downs. It’s quite a heartfelt thing. When I was eight or nine, the Scottish team meant so much to me, it the thing I was most invested in. There’s a line in there about how I used to memorise the whole squad before ‘78 and 82.”
Tell us about lyric: “This is Scotland, where everyone knows you start with nothing… where you can join an army for peace”…
“My wife made the video for it and she said, ‘I’m not sure I like that line about everyone starting with nothing’. Our first game is against Haiti and they really have nothing. Their country is pretty poor and they’re going through hard times. It was almost a throwaway line and I’m not sure what I meant by it, but in a footballing sense every game starts with nothing. Even if it’s against Brazil, you’ve always got a chance!
“The army refers to The Tartan Army, which has really been quite a remarkable institution for the past 30 years. We changed from drunken buffoons that used to wreck things to this excellent supporting brigade.”
It’s not your standard football sing-along. Can you see it being sung in the terraces?
“I’m not sure, I didn’t cynically design it for that. Many people have said to me in the past, ‘None of your songs have a chorus, you need to write one’. ‘This is Scotland’ is a chorus! They things need to happen organically. I’m sure the fans will still be singing ‘Yes sir, I can boogie’ for years to come.”
What do you actually think of Scotland’s chances right now?
“With the last Euros, they maybe got stage fright or didn’t have that tournament experience. I think Andy Robertson [captain] will be telling them, ‘We really need to produce our best stuff’. If they do and we see them actually playing football, then I don’t really care about the results that much. I just want to see Scotland exceeding our expectations of them. That Denmark game was so crazy that everything after just feels like a bonus.”
If miracles do happen and Scotland make it to the final, how will you celebrate? A free gig in Glasgow?
“Of course, yes! Free everything. If we even got close, I think the whole country would shut down for a year and the GDP would drop. We’d go into a massive recession but no one would care.
“We were playing a gig in Mexico City and I told the crowd, ‘It’s you and us, Mexico and Scotland in the final’. Mexico have never really got close either. I told them it would be five goals a piece, even after everyone takes a penalty and we have to share the trophy. I would settle for that.”
You released two albums in quick succession with 2022’s ‘A Bit of Previous’, 2023’s ‘Late Developers’ and then your debut novel Nobody’s Empire in 2024. You’ve been busy! Is there any progress on new material?
“We went through a period where we recorded a lot and we said, ‘Let’s not record for a while and give ourselves a couple of cycles off’. We’re doing these 30th anniversary shows so we’re just going to lean on the back catalogue and cruise for a while. We’re doing a year on and a year off so everyone can focus on different things.
We’re not looking at new Belles stuff for a while. I’m meant to be developing Nobody’s Empire into a film, so that’s my next task. It’s a long way off from being made but I’m going to write the script for that.”
Scotland’s first World Cup tournament match is against Haiti on Sunday June 14, before they go on to play Morocco on Friday June 19 and Brazil on Wednesday June 24.
The band’s ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ anniversary tour continues throughout the summer, performing the iconic albums in full during across the UK, Europe, North America, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Japan. Visit here for tickets and more information.
