HAVVK comes back swinging a fierce return that refuses to wait on new release “Sweet Goodbye”

HAVVK are back with a new release, “Sweet Goodbye,” a grenade of an anthem from the Irish alt-rock duo comprising Julie Hawk on vocals/bass and Matthew Harris on guitar, and it’s the sound of a band returning to the room with complete purpose. There’s no soft reintroduction here. “Sweet Goodbye” arrives with the authority of a band that knows what they want to say, where, and how loud they want to say it.

It’s a clean, sharp return for HAVVK, and one that bodes well for what comes next. Shortly thereafter, the band released “On Time,” a song that similarly emphasizes this era’s immediacy and emotional heft. Ticking along on a rolling snare and an insistent, climbing guitar figure, the song races ahead with restless momentum and Julie Hawk’s pointed sprechgesang. It’s combative, direct, and impossible to ignore.

Penned by Hawk and Harris, and produced by Matt Harris with Rocky O’Reilly, the song taps into a universal modern fear, the ticks of arbitrary clocks under relentless lists of goals and resolutions we set for ourselves. At the core of the song, is an increasingly important realization that time and effort are finite, and without a method to choose where they should be spent, everything will soon come crashing down. That tension is what makes this release so urgent. HAVVK captures that feeling of being pushed to the brink, right on the lip of a wave of busyness, working up to what they call last wave, where you’re telling yourself calm seas must be around the corner. “Sweet Goodbye” and subsequent music succeed in that moment of pressure, making overwhelm something cathartic, loud, and very human. 

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