For decades, bands across the planet have blasted out their versions of heavy, desert-style rock, driven by a deep and mystical fascination with the desert. Blue Heron is a heavy rock band from Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose firsthand relationship with the desert is inextricable from who they are and how they sound.
Blue Heron's guitarist and singer were founding members of Spiritu, possibly Albuquerque's first desert rock band, who burned briefly yet brightly with a Jack Endino-produced debut LP, a European tour with Clutch, Spiritual Beggars and Dozer, and a compilation slot next to Entombed and Mastodon.
Re-constituting this core in 2018, Blue Heron coalesced around a compulsion to fill the wide New Mexico skies with massive volume, and saturate their piece of desert with rolling, thunderous riffs, drums that pummel and swing, deep, thrumming tones and vocals that rip and roar.
On December 3rd, 2021, Blue Heron self-released the 'Black Blood of the Earth' EP, the same month contributing a track to Magnetic Eye Records' 'Best of AC/DC (Redux)' alongside Kryptograf, Kal-El, Supersuckers, Domkraft and more.
Of the debut EP, The Big Takeover said, "Blue Heron hits the sweet spot at the center of a vortex around which swirls sensual stoner doom, thuggish heavy blues and bad trip psychedelia," and Real Gone Rocks called 'Black Blood of the Earth,' "an instantly classic slab of stoner."
'Ephemeral,' Blue Heron's debut full-length, is an 8-track, 47-minute exploration of heavy rock at its fullest. Excavating the far reaches and connected strata of stoner rock, sludge, doom, heavy psych and post-metal, Blue Heron transmute years of engagement with rock and metal's profuse branches into a singular, sand-scorching epic. With lyrical threads ranging from mortality and failed civilations to mythic fables and cinematic re-imaginations, 'Ephemeral' is stylistically diverse, thematically ambitious and unassailably relentless in its raw, desert power.
Blue Heron 'Ephemeral' arrives on May 27th from Seeing Red Records in North America and Kozmik Artifactz in Europe.
300 copies on neon orange, 200 copies A Side / B Side Effect red / blue, all in gatefold sleeve.
