You can almost smell the dust in this one! Emulations sounds like the kind of record that shouldn’t even exist anymore – recorded loud enough to leave dents in the room, but played with the patience of people who’ve been through the long haul of noise and come back wanting only the essentials. No tricks, no shiny edges. Just heat, weight, and the sort of sound that fills up the air until you forget where it’s coming from.
Blue Heron have that desert thing that isn’t really about the desert at all – more like being surrounded by too much space and needing to fill it with something that feels alive. There’s no rush here, but no slack either. The riffs move like machines that have been running too long – steady, heavy, but starting to melt at the corners. The voice cuts through like a weathered instrument, somewhere between a shout and a warning.
There’s a strange calm under all the volume. You can tell these songs weren’t written to impress anyone. They feel like the result of a band chasing their own echo until it turned into a kind of ritual. The live tracks especially – they sound a little unhinged, like everything might come apart at any second, but that’s what makes them hit. Not in the punchy, radio-rock sense – more like an engine idling in the middle of nowhere, thick air, long afternoon, everyone sweating but no one moving.
They throw in some covers, Clutch, Floor, Fudge Tunnel, but it doesn’t feel like homage. More like they dragged those songs out into the sand and left them to sunburn a bit. The edges crumble, the tone swells, and somehow it all fits. You can hear the history of heavy music being sifted through calloused hands, and what comes out is something both worn and real.
Emulations feels like a document of where heavy rock actually lives right now – not on playlists or festival posters, but in small rooms, in stubborn amps, in people who still believe loudness can mean something. It’s not perfect, and that’s the point. It’s a record that makes sense when the day’s gone too long and the light’s gone weird – when all you want is a sound that knows how that feels.
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Released by Blues Funeral Recordings on October 10th, 2025
