Sweetheart Dropping Two Unreleased Albums via Expert Work Records

Expert Work Records, has released the entire discography of the post-hardcore, punk-rock band Sweetheart. Expert Work will release both the one-song-long EP, The Process Of Making Us Well, and the full-length LP, The Unbearable Tightness Of Being. These long-awaited releases are the first from Sweetheart in 20 years and available here.

Founded in Kent(Ohio), Sweetheart became one of the most notable bands on the Ohio scene of the 2000s, playing hundreds of shows from 2002 until their breakup in 2006. Four friends raised on house shows and inside jokes were fortunate enough to play hundreds of shows through a lot of basements, bars and DIY spaces all over Ohio and across the US. Those shows were aggressive physicality, and abrasive guitar-driven tonalities that got united together in the perfect symbiosis with the lyrics that are “mostly about being a punk band from Columbus, OH.”, according to the band. In 2005, Sweetheart loaded the Dodge van, travelled out west and recorded an album that never saw the light. Until now.

Breaking up after recording some songs, leaving the material never released, seems like a common thing for a lot of bands of the late 90s/early 2000s. “The band broke up before we were happy with mixes,” Michael Howard(guitar/vocals) reflects about the end of Sweetheart as a band. “At the time it seemed financially irresponsible to press it when we had to cancel tours and knew the label wouldn’t break even on a release.”

The band comments on finally getting to distribute their art & hard work to the world:

“There’s a lyric on the LP that says ‘In five years, none of this will mean anything to anyone but me’ and I think we sort-a figured that was true so we just dropped it. Until Justin at Expert Work came along and asked to release it! It’s hard to describe how grateful and excited we are to see this huge part of our early 20’s finally come into the world. We all worked so hard on it, and had long ago made some peace with that work, so for Expert Work to revive it 20 years later is beyond thrilling. Just being in touch with each other again, and now having a Sweetheart group text, has been a really lovely experience.”

Sweetheart ‘The Process Of Making Us Well’ EP album artwork

Self-recorded by the band in a Warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, in the spring of 2005, the EP The Process Of Making Us Well became the longest piece of music ever recorded by Sweetheart; and represents an entire collection of work for the band. “Our Columbus friends Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea wrote long, sprawling songs that started slow and took their time getting anywhere; kind of opposite to us,” explains the members of Sweetheart talking about nature of their one-song-long EP. Over the course of 12 minutes the band manages to perfectly unite their qualities of compositional complexity and suspense they borrowed from Unwound and later Neurosis.

Approaching the listening, editing and writing process with teaching perspective, Sweetheart managed to find their personal Zen. “Listening as a discipline,” Stresses Bryan Parker. We valued experimentation and honesty for what’s working and not working. Listening came from repetition. Playing riffs over and over and over again. Internalizing and getting inside and out of our ideas. We took our time.”

The Unbearable Tightness Of Being is an example of a precisely complex well-composed record. Building the compositional structure of the album, Sweetheart manages to pull away different elements associated with punk-rock, hardcore and post-hardcore music, using them in a non-dogmatic way. Recorded in 2005, the only LP of Sweetheart is finally being released to the world in 2024.

Sweetheart ‘The Unbearable Tightness Of Being’ album artwork