The Heat Inc. bring old ghosts and heavy melody together on Mind Control
The Heat Inc. have released Mind Control, a darkly theatrical new single shaped by fragments of songs that had been sitting with the band for more than a decade.
Released on 2 July via Tri-Tone Records and Republic of Music, the track pairs a long-simmering chorus melody with the riff and verse from Belacqua, an unreleased song previously written by vocalist Jon Dodd and bassist Nico Rigot in an earlier band.
Dodd says the song only properly revealed itself when those separate ideas finally connected. “Marco had this Chorus melody, I think and I had the lyric for the chorus for years,” he explains. “We struggled to make it into a whole song, then suddenly I noticed that it fit with the main verse riff and maybe the coda of an old track Nico and I had played in our previous band but never recorded. One day everything just locked into place.”
A ringmaster leads the reckoning
That collision of old material and present-day chemistry feeds into Mind Control’s unsettling narrative. Dodd found its verses while tracking the song at Woodworm, imagining a ringmaster guiding visitors through a carnival of past relationships and regrets.
“I couldn’t get a verse lyric down for it until tracking at Woodworm,” Dodd continues. “Then I realised there was this figure — a ringmaster of sorts — guiding a tour of unhappy tourists around a carnival where the exhibits feature lovers you’ve known and possibly wronged in the past. The chorus became a kind of cautionary reprisal to anyone who might enter.”
The result is a tightly wound track that shifts between force and melody without treating either as a separate mode. Dodd says that balance remains central to the group’s writing.
“Any number of bands can go heavy and there are a lot of bands out there that do easier numbers as a habit,” he says. “But very few can do both in one evening and not seem like two totally different bands. There is a very succinct blend of heaviness with melody that we try to maintain at all times without thinking too hard about it.”
Instinct over excess
Dodd credits the band’s increasing familiarity with one another for the directness of the new material, with guitarist Marco Simoncelli, Rigot and drummer Maurizio Vitale bringing a sharper collective sense of what serves the song.
“We definitely understand one another better now,” Dodd says. “Stuff comes together faster and we have a pretty keen sense for what’s going to work before getting stuck in the weeds. We’ve always been okay with going for the gentle, melodic number, but now we can do that while still maintaining an intensity that doesn’t overthrow an otherwise beautiful song.”
Stream Mind Control here.
