Introducing: HEFF VANSAINT - Aberdeen/London Indie-Pop Songwriter's New EP 'Best Days Gone' Released 4th October 2024
Introducing: HEFF VANSAINT
Aberdeen/London Indie-Pop Songwriter Announces New EP Best Days Gone Released 4th October 2024
Stream Lead Single ‘Heart On Trial’ Released 1st August 2024
Stream and share - HERE
Aberdeen-born, London-based singer-songwriter Heff VanSaint is delighted to reveal her new EP Best Days Gone, which will be released on 4th October 2024.
To celebrate the news, lead single ‘Heart On Trial’ will be released on 1st August 2024.
Commenting on the inspiration for the single, VanSaint says: “I was thinking a lot about home, and a love story set sometime in the past, watching a lot of old episodes of Taggart and thinking about the book Young Mungo by Scottish writer Douglas Stuart, and the Glasgow band The Blue Nile.”
Born and raised in Aberdeen, Heff has been playing in bands since she was a teenager, often alongside the raft of Scottish indie boys that flooded her native scene. Moving to London in her early 20s, she formed an electro-pop duo that went on to amass a decent following, before going solo to explore the more personal and reflective aspects of her creative output. As an artist, VanSaints seeks to combine queer culture with themes that are universal and part of the human condition.
“I’m passionate about achieving more visibility for masc presenting queer people,” she says. “I think representation matters for all of us and it’s empowering to see yourself depicted in pop culture.”
Combining elements of pop, electronic, and indie with 80s influences, VanSaint’s music traverses the liminal space between frank honesty and hopeful optimism, with the songwriter interested in exploring environments that challenge fixed definitions, exploring the inherent messiness of being human.
Naming iconic songwriters such as Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young as her main influences, she uses songwriting and storytelling as a prism through which to make sense of life’s experiences from her unique perspective, drawing inspiration from her love of artists with an androgynous image and energy, like The XX, Frank Ocean, St Vincent, and of course greats like Prince and Bowie.
With previous releases spanning themes of unrequited love, loneliness, the cost of living crisis, and navigating life as a creative person in London, VanSaint channels her experiences as a young creative living through challenging times into her melancholy but hopeful material.
Forthcoming new EP Best Days Gone is a new collection of songs recorded across 3 months during the autumn of 2023 in West Malling, Kent with producer Callum ‘Raff’ Rafferty. “I first met Raff two years ago through an old manager and we immediately hit it off,” says VanSaint of the process. “His studio is state of the art. He’s got everything you’d need in terms of different analogue synths and guitars to help you produce the sound that you want. It’s just always a very chilled and straightforward experience.”
The track is the first new material from VanSaint since her well-received 2023 debut EP Odes Of Hope For Sad Bois. The perfect early showcase for her prowess as a gifted new Scottish songwriter and storyteller, the record gained early praise from Pink News, Diva Magazine, When The Horn Blows, and more, with VanSaint subsequently playing alongside Fox Gunn and appearing on London Live to discuss how the ongoing cost of living crisis has affected artists and musicians.
“I think with any relationship or experience you become more confident the second time around,” she says of tackling the new EP. “I definitely went in with a clear vision surrounding what I wanted. For example the saxophone fill at the end of Heart On Trial, I was like ‘I need this to sound like this’ and I just basically just sang it at Raff and he worked out the notes,” she laughs. “I also didn’t really care about how catchy or fashionable the whole thing sounded. I just wanted to create a collection of sounds that complemented the story that I was trying to tell.”
As for that story, reflective EP tracks ‘Heart On Trial’ and ‘Weavers Fields’ are a bittersweet look back on what’s been and gone, and what is ultimately lost and can never be regained, before antidote ‘Pathways’ provides the alchemy of looking to the future and remembering that everything changes, good and bad; nothing is permanent.
“Hopefully people connect with it and it offers some escapism,” says VanSaint of her ambitions for the record. “If people can connect the tracks to their own memories I’ll be delighted. That’s when you know something’s resonated. I really want to find my audience and provide them with many more tunes going forward.”
New EP Best Days Gone released 4th October 2024
Live Dates:
2nd August - London - Venue TBC
