Seahaven

Sometimes, inspiration just flows. That’s exactly what happened when Kyle Soto began writing what would become Seahaven’s self-titled fourth album. Once he made the first step with the song “Wedding Bells”, everything just sort of tumbled out of him. That was in around April of 2025, and over the next four or five months the vocalist/guitarist would sit in his home studio space and “churn out a song nose to tail in a night” until he’d made a base outline of the record. “When the juices are flowing,” he says, “you don’t stop it. You’ve got to keep going.”

It’s a marked difference from the way the Torrance, CA band—completed by guitarist Cody Christian, bassist Mike DeBartolo and drummer Eric Findlay—made their previous record, 2020’s Halo Of Hurt. That one was an intentionally collaborative process between the four-piece at every stage of the process. This time around, Soto let what needed to come out of him do so in a more isolated manner.

“Clearly, there’s been a lot of things going on in my life over the past couple of years that I’m sorting through,” he admits. “I wasn’t cognizantly thinking that I needed to put it all into song, but I’d sit down with a guitar to see what would happen, and I’d end up going into a flow state.”

Those outlines, often born from a stream of consciousness, were then recorded by the four-piece at the Pale Moon Ranch recording studio in Juniper Hills, CA. Self-produced, but engineered by Alex Estrada who runs the studio, and then mixed and mastered by Will Yip, the result is an album that, lyrically, dives deeply into Soto’s recent life experiences, but also solidifies and expands on the sound the band have been building since forming in 2009.

While reasserting, redefining and reintroducing the identity of a band is something that self-titled albums often do, that wasn’t Seahaven’s express intentions with this one. Rather, the ideas that the band had had for a title never quite clicked, so they decided to lean into what it meant to not have one.

“Sonically, this album takes most of the elements from our previous releases and rolls them into one,” says Soto. “I feel like it accurately represents our sound, so it’s fitting to have it serve as a statement that says ‘This is the sound of the band.’ For a minute there, I wasn’t sure if we were going to roll with it, but then we decided to just own it. A lot of bands have self-titled albums that are hopefully their defining record—and hopefully for us that’s this one.”

There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. From the beginning Seahaven kicks off with the comforting (but lyrically deceptive) lilt of opener “Godsend” through to the melancholy finale of “Companion” and its fragile acceptance of the ephemeral nature of life, this is an album that does indeed feel like some kind of definitive, defining statement. The upbeat angst of songs like “Hellbound” and “February Flowers”, the muted anguish of “Remember Me”, the melancholy, anthemic longing of “Infinite Blue”, and the self-aware emotional distress of “Tidal Wave” all combine to create a record that’s simultaneously deeply personal and also wholly relatable. It’s that universality of the specific that truly defines this album, that helps elevate it to beyond anything the band have made before, that does indeed mark it as the band’s defining record.

It’s actually on “Wedding Bells”—that first song Soto wrote for this album, and the penultimate one on it—where that all truly comes into focus. It’s subtle, if not almost unnoticeable, but in two seemingly throwaway words—‘Thirty-three, Valerie’—Soto does something he’s never ever done before. He uses the name of a real person. For while everything Seahaven have ever released has been rooted in truth, for him to keep that name in there was a significant and deliberate artistic choice. It doesn’t, of course, necessarily mean the entire song is about her, but it does add a previously uncharted level of honesty to both the song and the album. It’s heart-on-sleeve confessionalism, the pure truth embedding itself in art the way that it does when art reaches its zenith.

“I’ve actually never used a name in any of my songs,” admits Soto, “even though they’re very much written about very specific people. I’ve always left names out of it. But when it came to that verse, I was just walking around my house and listening to the loop of the guitar, and the lyrics were just falling out of me, and that was immediately the first lyric. I went back and forth over a few months or so, and I have a couple of different versions of the demo where I take her name out, but it was just such a natural thing that I opted to keep it in.”

Whether psychological or otherwise, that flicker of reality increases the emotional gravitas of not just the song, but the whole album. It’s a dark journey into the center of existence, into the way that life and love both take away as much as they give, and how we’re always stuck between the two, unable to control the way any of it ebbs and flows. As such, it’s an incredibly gratifying but devastating listen, one full of contradictions and a hunger for a very human truth and desire to be remembered—or at least not forgotten. But it’s musically ambitious, too, in its quest to revisit everything that’s always been great about the band while also serving as something of a new beginning.

“Some of these songs are probably my darkest lyrical content,” Soto says, “but I also think that there are probably some of the catchiest hooks that we’ve ever had on record. So there’s an interesting juxtaposition of lyrical content and what’s happening sonically. And that’s my favorite stuff—things that are very melancholy and sad lyrically, but you can also dance to it. It’s such a blessing to have this outlet and this passion for music to be able to work through a lot of life’s trials and tribulations. I’ve met listeners of the band who have told me a lot of struggles they’ve gone through in life and how my music’s helped them like other people’s music has helped me, and I’m so happy I can do that for other people.”

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