Oceans Ate Alaska are hitting it back with a huge band with the news of their new album ‘Purge which drops Jan. 2027. This marks the bands first album with new vocalist Joel Heywood and the first of their career released completely independently. To mark the occasion the band has released a new song and music video named ‘Bring You Back’.
“Bring You Back” comes from one of the hardest stretches of Heywood’s life, when his wife was pulled under by prenatal and postnatal depression. “She was at the lowest point I’d ever seen her in my life and all I wanted to do was save her,” Heywood says. “No matter how much love and care or attention to her issues I gave, it’s chemical, and nothing I could do would help her to come back to who she was. For her it just felt endless.” Hodson’s video pushes that story into deliberately heightened territory. “It’s an over the top version of events of her becoming a ‘ghost of herself,’ a ghost of the person she once was,” Heywood explains, “and I felt powerless no matter how much I tried.“
That song sets the tone for an album built on mental health from front to back. Heywood describes Purge as a set of diary entries covering the everyday battles he and many others face: the weight of online negativity, substance abuse, love and relationships, childhood trauma and the lowest point of suicidal thoughts, with what he calls “peaks of positivity sprinkled in.” The title came from reading about trephination, an ancient surgery that opens the skull to relieve blood and pressure. “Purge came from wanting to finally get this all out of me,” he says, “to let it bleed from me onto the songs and into the pages of the lyrics, and to try to start to feel free of things I’ve held inside for so long.“
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