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Elliott Smith’s former band Heatmiser are celebrating 30 years of their 1996 album Mic City Sons with an expanded, 2xLP reissue. The new edition arrives on July 25th courtesy of Third Man Records.
The new package features a remastered LP of Mic City Sons’ 12 original songs, plus a new LP containing a set of rare demos and unreleased tracks. The set will arrive on standard black vinyl and limited-edition Sunset Pink Transparent & Starry Night Blue Glitter vinyl. Heatmiser have also offered a new teaser detailing the making of Mic City Sons and its legacy 30 years later; watch it below. Pre-orders are ongoing.
Released on October 29, 1996, Mic City Sons served as Heatmiser’s third and final album. Though it was met with acclaim, the project was an extremely challenging endeavor for the quartet and led to their disbandment; initially, the album was supposed to be Heatmiser’s major label debut, but upon learning that the band were on the verge of breaking up, Virgin Records pulled out, and Mic City Sons was instead released by the independent label Caroline. After the release, songwriters Smith and Neil Gust went their separate ways, with Smith continuing his solo career and Gust forming the aptly-named new band, No. 2.
The surviving members of Heatmiser — Gust, bassist Brandt Peterson (and later, Sam Coomes), and drummer Tony Lash — eventually regrouped to celebrate their output with 2023’s sprawling compilation The Music of Heatmiser, also released via Third Man Records. That process of sorting through hours of demo tapes and unreleased music led to the group revisiting the Mic City Sons sessions.
“I started to go through and found stuff that was pretty much finished, but just never mixed, and some other things that we had run out of time to fully develop,” said Tony Lash in a press release. “It brought me back to that time in a really visceral way. It made me appreciate this creative space and creative life that we were able to sustain there for a little bit. If only we could have somehow worked our way through all the interpersonal issues. I think the record shows that we could be a really good band.”
Revisit Heatmiser’s 2023 edition of Crate Digging, where Gust and Peterson break down 10 Pacific Northwest albums they think everyone should own.
English (US) · 