Like This

“Like This'”is the first single off of Urban Heat’s album, The Tower, set to release via Artoffact Records in Summer 2024. Want to skip ahead to the bits directly about the song? Scroll down to the video and read on from there – however you choose to read, thanks for spending some time here today! [Photo Credit: Jonathan Horstmann]

April 2023.

It’s Thursday night heading into a long weekend and I’m on my way to the concert venue straight from work, where I stayed late. I stayed late because the vast majority of the city doesn’t have power, and I was checking over and over again to make sure the bar was still in this magic triangle exempt from the outages. Plus, work had power, heat, and coffee which made it a pretty attractive place to remain – especially with the knowledge that I’d be going back to a cold, dark apartment. April here isn’t exactly warm. 

I’m on my way to see Vision Video – they’re the reason I bought my ticket, but sometime earlier in the week I realised I was going because of Urban Heat. Which isn’t to say Vision Video aren’t great! They are, and just released a phenomenal new video to accompany an equally great version of “In My Side” [here] that I seriously suggest checking out, it’s a gift to horror lovers everywhere, truly. But the reason I’m squashing my apprehensions as I’m halfway through my walk to the venue? That’s all Urban Heat. I’ve written about them, and my excitement leading into seeing them live [here].

(For the record I’ve seen them twice now and will be seeing them another handful of times this December. I’m already grinning about it more than a month out. But we aren’t there yet. At this point, I still haven’t seen them the first time.)

I’m excited, certainly, but… Still… I’m not sure. It’s my first concert since November 2019, and I’m nervous. Would anyone else be masking? (Yes, one other person that I noticed. Shout out to you, whoever you were.) Was getting home at 2am if I made all my bus transfers appealing? (No. And while I didn’t know it at the time it wouldn’t matter as I’d miss one of them and wind up having to Uber most of the way home anyway.) 

Did I really want to go to an unfamiliar bar on my own? Nottttt even a little bit! No part of me wanted to do that. It was my first time in a bar since picking up sobriety in October 2021 – something I hadn’t consciously thought about until I was minutes away from the bar going “oh. Oh hold on.” Did I have a moment of “well I could just get a beer, it’d be fine right?” Yep. (It would not have been, it was never just one drink.)

… Was the alternative a cold apartment and inability to reach anyone I know as I live in a weird dead zone that doesn’t even allow me to use data when the power’s out? Yes. Yes it was, and the knowledge of that isolation – and that the bar had heat – was a big part of why I wound up going, even as my stomach tied itself into tighter and tighter knots.

It wasn’t just all of that, though. And let me clear: ‘all that’ was enough. But the show was less than a week after my birthday – the first since my dad’s death in July 2022. It marked the first year that I was going into without him, and had me thinking about the year before and how I hadn’t bothered to go see him on my birthday. It wouldn’t have changed anything, even at that point he was terribly ill (not that I knew this), and I can’t go back and change the past but… it was on my mind.

Add to this that the long weekend we were heading into was for Easter, also the first without him! While not something I celebrate I was still feeling his absence. It meant, basically, a solid two weeks of him visiting my dreams which was (and remains) both wonderful and exhausting. There’s always a moment where I recognize he’s gone and won’t be there when I wake up but… I get to see him. So, there’s that. Basically I was in a weird and fragile spot even without the isolating 4+ day power outage. 

Now at this point you may well be asking yourself “what does any of this have to do with ‘Like This’? What is this, a recipe blog making its money off advertising?” 

To what any of this has to do with the song: nothing, but maybe something. Maybe a lot. There’s parallels, for me, between the song’s subject matter and where I was at. It’s the context around my first time hearing ‘Like This’. (And no, this is not like a recipe blog – the only money exchange happening is what I pay to keep The Cauldron ad-free.)

Back to the show! I have a grand total of one photo and two video clips (totaling 43 seconds together) from it. ‘Like This’ was one of them because I didn’t recognize it, and it immediately wormed its way into my brain where it stayed for months. Until the Do512 Lounge Session [here] released in August, my 20 second clip of the tail end of the song was all I had to go on. Well, that and wherever it came up in videos others had taken, or was used as background music in one of the band’s instagram posts. Believe me, I was listening for it and brightened each time.

(Tangent, but it got me thinking about music and the experience of it before recordings were widely available – long before we had it at our fingertips at any minute of the day. I think it’s something we take for granted, how accessible some arts are (comparatively) to how they used to be. I’ve got criticisms for days on how a fast-paced industry where you constantly need to be feeding the algorithm is uh, awful at best and actively detrimental somewhere in the middle, but – but – that I can sit in my living room and watch a recording of a song from a city I’ve never been to, in another country? That’s incredibly cool.)

So. This twenty second clip was what I had to go on, and it was enough to keep me going! 

Not just in terms of having a hope in hell of getting the ear worm out of my head on occasion but also when, in the days to come, I found myself struggling with my mental health more than I had in a significant amount of time. My support network is great, and while I spent the majority of the weekend with one friend or another there were still parts of it where I was alone and for those hours? ‘Like This’ was a reminder, a pertinent and important reminder, that I wasn’t alone in what I was feeling.

We hear a lot of “you’re not alone” when it comes to mental health struggles. That doesn’t necessarily make things easier when our brains are in crisis and doing their absolute best to fight us. Personally I’ve been big on “this feeling right now sucks but, like everything, it will pass. I don’t know when, but I won’t feel this way forever.” It has been especially helpful for the last year and a bit of my grief journey. That weekend? It wasn’t working at all. 

But, while curled up in bed, wondering at the point of leaving it with my brain conveniently forgetting the various people I’d spent time with who love me (we know how it goes), that 20 second video helped. I might not have known if I would ever feel better and even when I said “I can’t live like this” for the first time in a very long time, I knew I wasn’t alone. What got through was “I can feel it in my bones when it starts to come around, it comes around, it comes around like this.” delivered with a punchy synth melody made for dancing. 

If you’re feeling it in your bones, you know it well enough to feel it there – deep within, you’re familiar. Recognizing and naming it can help but man, it’s still hard. “I can’t feel. I cannot leave the bed again. And oh my god I know I feel depressed again.” Immensely relatable. And for me, at least, it wasn’t just about the depression – it was also about the sudden identity crisis I’d found myself in upon realising that I’d spent the last several years trying to be someone I wasn’t, trying to be other people’s versions of me, and being left with the question “who the hell am I?”

It’s one thing to have people tell you they understand and get it, it’s another to feel someone else gets it and could be singing about your own experience. Music, art, is powerful in the ways it allows us to connect – not just with it, but with one another. 

With that, I hope you enjoy “Like This”! Once you’ve given it a listen, read on for some fun little tidbits frontman Jonathan Horstmann provided when I reached out with some questions. 

6am, October 27th: I’ve been listening to the Do512 recording of this song on repeat since it dropped in August so that’s the version I know. My delight at hearing this recording? The differences between it and the live version? Oh my god. The beat drop around 2:20 is even heavier, and takes the familiar upbeat synths of their sound and makes it a little bit darker. That leading into the whisper-singing of “I can try my best […]” brings the song into a new territory we haven’t quite heard from Urban Heat before and the “these little white, little white-” is such a… it’s creepy (complimentary, so complimentary)? It strikes me as almost a restrained scream, that teetering and rocking back and forth between holding it together and very much not doing that – excellent, I love it. The punchiness of the end has always been a favourite of mine, this decisive “it comes around like this” (and I/we/you will get through it) brings that familiar little bit of hope. It comes around like this, and that’s a fact, but the storm will be weathered. Again, I’m huge on “their music meets you where you’re at” and would love to hear your thoughts and interpretations! It’s a jam, and has been on repeat all morning as I dance around the apartment.

7:30am, October 27th: Took me a minute to track down the video as I was on the band’s YouTube page and not the label’s – they’ve signed with Artoffact Records, how cool is that? – and this is why you always check the linkpop first! How great is this video? I love the lighting used throughout and that same blue used in the single artwork – and that has now also replaced the red on their website. I spend a lot of time over there, like “skew traffic numbers towards Canada” time, and my excitement at seeing the update for “Like This” along with the red being replaced by the blue-ish colour associated with the background heart of the “Like This” single art? Immense.

It looks modern and slick and the sense of unreality feels like a great fit for this song. The bar setting is great, the transition between main figures is hah, yeah, that struck a chord – it really drives home the “this is about mental health, substance abuse and identity” feeling. I’ve only had time to watch it once but damn! What a treat, it looks the way the song feels and that’s remarkable to me. Fun note: While a standalone story the video “could definitely be seen as a continuation” of the story started in the videos for “Have You Ever? Piano Version” and “Goodbye Horses.”

Releasing in Summer 2024 The Tower boasts “Like This” as its first single. “We pull from a much more varied palette of influences for this record and we wanted to ease into it,” says Horstmann, “[Like This] feels like the bridge between our last collection of songs and this full record. We’re going to some new places in this record.”

‘The single definitely feels like the Urban Heat we know and love – it’s familiar in feeling while also having something a little bit different, a little bit new, a little heavier and darker. It’s a song the band have been playing live for awhile now and is sonically “informed by the experiences we’d been having playing out and travelling the country.”

The artistry doesn’t just end at the song and video, however. The artwork for the single is also Horstmann’s work, part of a series for each of the singles which will culminate in a large piece for the album cover. “I love Jesse Draxler’s collage work and wanted to do something in that vein but my own interpretation,” he explains.

A mixed media and multidisciplinary artist, Draxler’s work combines painting, photography, typography and digital painting. It is characterised through deconstructed, distorted images exploring beauty, sexuality and sub-culture. In an interview with Min Chen earlier this year [here], Draxler said: “I’m very interested in relationships, but mostly relationships between a person and themselves, a person and their various cells, a person and their subconscious, a person and their environment, […] how these relationships inform our perceptions and creates each of our own unique realities that we each live in.”  

Listen, I was already struck by the artwork for the single and of course I’m looking forward to seeing the others as they release, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more curious after doing some cursory reading on Draxler, his art, and practice. I’ve said it before and will say it again: connection, it’s a huge part of why artists of all types create, and having the opportunity to see connections between artists, their mediums, their works, and how they inspire each other to create more art is a beautiful thing. 

If you’re wanting a peak at another song off next year’s album, allow me to direct your attention to “Seven Safe Places,” below. It’s a stunningly beautiful song that I first heard at their Vancouver show in August and while I love “Like This,” this one? Its beauty is haunting and brings such a distinct ache with it. 

Other songs we know about from The Tower are “Say the Words” (which also hurts my heart, not in a bad way – similar to the way “City Lights” does. Similar, but still quite different), “Right Time of Night” (which is going to make its way onto every vampire adjacent playlist eventually and be a big hit at the goth clubs) and “Blindfolds and Magic Bullets” (“it’s not just enough all the words that I bring, there’s amends to be made and it’s all coming back for me” was already blowing me away, but the instrumental section at the end stops me dead in my tracks to just listen). 

Basically, it’s a great time to be an Urban Heat fan. Can we also talk about the album title for a second? I’m a fan, and I’m big on the recurring Tower symbology in their merch tying into the first record. Andddd there’s an extra tidbit in there too – which isn’t surprising, nothing this band does is unintentional. We know the release is next Summer, but if like me you’re nosy and would maybe like a better idea of when – good news, I asked. “All I’ll say is that the numerology for the date of the release lines up with the Tower card in Tarot.” Enjoy your favourite search engine if, like me, you weren’t previously familiar with the numerology!

So! “Like This” is out and you want to support it? Awesome, do that! We all know social media interactions go a long way – leave those likes, comments, follow them on social media and share the video and song around! Did you know that if you purchase the track off Bandcamp on Bandcamp Friday artists get up to 93% of the revenue shared? And did you know the next one is November 3rd, and that “Like This” will be available for it? (It’s available today, even, for free!) You can find ‘Like This’ on Bandcamp [here]. My fingers are itching to purchase it but I’m waiting until next week. (Pst, you can also nab the extended edition of Wellness as a CD now! Grab that one [here].)

Want to bring “Like This” with you in your day to day life? There’s a limited time merch drop available [here] including a t-shirt, cap, and zip hoodie. I’m not a cap person, but this sure made me want to be one – I think it might be my favourite of the three items. I wound up getting the hoodie, and will be picking it up from my friend in Philly when I go visit her in December (and bring her to the Philly show, of course).

And, good news for my fellow non-US people: flat rate shipping is now available! Go get your goodies, I’m going to be trying to snag one of the fragrance oils (I see sandalwood and am immediately on board) – they just restocked [here] today and sold out in 24 hours for the first drop – so act quick!

You can stream “Like This” on Spotify [here] and Apple Music [here]. Want to keep up with Urban Heat? Check them out on TikTok [here], Instagram [here], and be sure to check out their upcoming tour dates [here]! I’ll be at a few shows that first week of December, maybe we’ll dance together there?

That’s all from me this week, thanks so much for reading along! Stay cozy!