After releasing singles “Spit,” Laughing Without Smiling,” “The Gallows,” and their LP title track, Cleveland punk-rockers Heart Attack Man are ready to reveal their fourth LP, Joyride The Pale Horse on April 25.
This marks the trio’s second independent release, preceded by 2017’s The Manson Family, 2019’s Fake Blood, and 2023’s Freak Of Nature. In their most realized album to date, Heart Attack Man has found their stride and their voice. Touching on the nuances of death, aka “The Pale Horse,” lead vocalist Eric Egan, guitarist Ty Sickels, and drummer Adam Paduch eloquently wander through life’s highs, lows, anxieties, and reveries in less than an hour. Their gritty punk guitar lines, soaring vocals, and cheeky lyrics make it, no pun intended, a joyride.
idobi Radio had the chance to sit down with Egan ahead of the April 25 album release to chat about perceptions of death, how artificial intelligence is not ideal for creatives. Check out the full interview below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Obviously, Freak Of Nature (2023) was in your face, politically charged, and aggressive. Joyride The Pale Horse has those elements, too, but focuses primarily on death, of course. Did writing this album help you reckon with your own mortality?
You know, I just turned 32. I feel like when you hit the big 3-0, you do some soul-searching. I still think 30 is very young in the grand scheme of things. I mean, sometimes people just get started with whatever they’re doing at 30, and I think that’s awesome. But still, you know, at 30, for me, you’ve kind of lived long enough to maybe see some friends die or people that are close to you die. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but you start thinking about your parents or older family members and stuff. You don’t wanna think about it, but it’s just the inevitability of life. The people that you love do get older. It’s a little bit more pressing. So really, this album was kind of a journey into my own mortality and death itself.
How did the process of this record challenge you in different ways from your previous releases?
We are experimenting with new themes and going into uncharted waters there. Something else we wanted to do was kind of challenge ourselves to switch it up energy-wise as well. So really, I’d say that this album is the most consistent. We were like, “Let’s just like put the foot on the gas and go for the throat.” It’s 12 songs, just under 30 minutes. So we’re just making it all count, and I’d say the energy is a lot more consistently high. Sometimes it’s hard to balance doing something like that and having it be consistently engaging. So it was, it was a challenge in multiple ways. But we’re so excited about it. I feel lucky that every step of the way, [this was the] most excited I’ve been to release new music.
Your single “Spit” talks about the slippery slope of AI in the creative process. What would you say to people in the scene who, perhaps, don’t see the issue with using this technology?
My main gripe is [AI] in the creative process, using it to sort of sidestep actually doing the creative work to dig within your soul to wrench out something meaningful. I think that it’s a slippery slope, you know? And time will tell.
If a band’s like, “We have this song and I’m going ChatGPT lyrics,” that’s not coming from your heart at all. That is meaningless robot garbage, and it doesn’t mean anything. You can’t sell people on a story that isn’t real or isn’t a lived experience.
When you get into these subcultures and subgenres, especially like emo, punk, pop-punk, hardcore, anything of the like—the idea is that it’s supposed to be a bit more heartfelt and a bit more meaningful.
This album marks your second independent release. What have you learned as an independent band this time around?
Freak Of Nature was kind of like the test to see if we can do this. It wasn’t as smooth as we had initially envisioned at first. But I’d say that this record, we’ve kind of ironed out things. It’s all a learning experience. For example, we released [Freak Of Nature] and then we were doing our headlining album release tour… and technically, the album release date was the second day of the tour. But for us in an independent application, it made a bit more sense this time to release [Joyride The Pale Horse] ahead because we’re shipping out every pre-order ourselves, and we want to be able to be home to send them out.
And then, you can release your singles and everything, but once the album’s out, you don’t know what songs are going to be the fan-favorites and are going to pop. So, I think it also gives us a little bit more time to kind of suss out what songs are hitting for the fans and what we should prioritize playing live. As much as we want to play everything, we’re four full-length albums in now, and it’s getting real hard to write set lists.
I pulled a quote that I really liked from one of the press releases that says, “We’ve only just begun to tell our story.” So with that being said, is there a part of your story you’re really excited to tell people on this upcoming tour? Do you kind of know where you want your story to end up?
I think the story ends when I die. I don’t know exactly the sort of twists and turns it’s going to go. But one thing that I am really excited about this upcoming album and sort of the era of this album. I feel like we’re a band that has kind of, for better or for worse, existed in between a few different things. Adam and Ty [and I] all kind of share a similar prevailing sentiment that we kind of fit in between a few different things.
That was kind of the theme of Freak Of Nature: feeling a little bit on the out of things, where we’re like, “Well, we’re having a great time and we’re super happy and grateful to be here. Also, there’s this identity crisis where we don’t exactly fit perfectly in, per se. And that’s not a bad thing. I would rather stand out somewhere and be known for doing something a little different than fit perfectly in—be a circular peg in a circular hole.
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We’re balancing that light and dark with the moments where the humor and the self-awareness and all that is shining through. I feel like the word gets thrown around a lot by bands when they reach a certain point in their career where they’re like, “Oh, this is our most mature album yet.” But I can’t help but think of that, that it is a little bit more mature in ways.
I would say The Manson Family, our first album, there is this preoccupation with misery and sadness. I’d say that, I mean, that album feels immature and not in a bad way. It’s a lot of sort of cursory, surface-level reactions to the feelings of sadness, despair, and betrayal, which kind of you know, led into Fake Blood and onward. I’d say that this album is abstract. This is the most proud I’ve been of my lyrics and my voice, personally. I feel like for the first time ever, really, I feel like a singer. And it’s kind of funny because I’ve been doing it for 10 years now in this band.
