Green Hills

The Heavenly Bodes — 2026

“The Heavenly Bodes make garage psych feel lived-in, sunbaked, and just unstable enough to keep moving.”

There is a good chance if you are into classic-sounding psych then The Heavenly Bodes will be a record you will want to hear. The Cornish quartet came up through Falmouth’s Kernowbeat psych scene and recorded their debut live to an aging Fostex eight-track in a friend’s living room during a July heatwave. That background paints the perfect backdrop as you can feel these jams with that warmth sitting right behind them. The guitars arrive with a brightness that cuts straight through the mix, while Fin Wilson’s organ wobbles in and out like it might faint while giving tracks a retro vibe, and Iolo Puleston’s bass hits harder than the fidelity has any right to allow. The whole thing splits its time between scrappy garage foot tappers and slower, half-drifters that you can sway to, but the tape hiss ties it all together into one great listen. I really like how the album absolutely does not rely on conventional song structure as you get some instrumental driven tracks that fall almost into a surf psych genre while the record thrives in the sweet spot where garage rock grit, bluesy boogie, and psychedelic lo-fi collide, turning loose grooves that sound both road-tested and slightly unhinged.

“Faux Pillars” is the keeper for me, a track just over five minutes that swerves into a vintage surf break midway through and a full highlight ending that is driven by the organ which feels like a flash out of the ’60s. It is the moment where their jam looseness pays off as an actual songwriting tool instead of just an aesthetic. “De Groene Heuvels” kicks the record off and gives the album its title in Dutch as it leans into the woozier, more instrumental psych sedated haze of the record. “Spitting The Pips Out” rounds things out with its more scorching guitar and classic psych groove that just sounds like the kind of thing that would have fit on a Nuggets series garage compilation without anyone blinking.

When the band rocks up a little bit plus the vocals I hear The Murlocs, who at times easily share the same knack for both loose and tight song structures underneath the psych haze. That same sound can be found in multiple places in the King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard catalog, and while the Bodes never chase that band’s restless genre hopping, much of that psych energy is here. On the mellower cuts, the sunbaked jangle lands closer to Allah-Las territory, where the reverb works for the band.

Plenty of bands have chased this sound with studio tricks but The Heavenly Bodes have a genuinely authentic sound to them that is both engaging and timeless.