The Arcs Honor Late Richard Swift With New Song & Video “Heaven Is A Place”

Today The Arcs have returned with “Heaven Is A Place,” the second look at their new album, Electrophonic Chronic, coming out January 27 via Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound. Behind a sea of dreamlike tones from The Arcs’s Leon Michels on Rhodes and B3, Auerbach adds blistering electric guitar to this lament for love gone too soon.

On the group’s first album together since 2015’s Yours, Dreamily, and the first since the passing of their bandmate Richard Swift, there’s a moving poignancy that resonates through the lyrics of “Heaven Is A Place”: “heaven is a place I know, where all the lovers go / and when they die / everything they had on Earth is multiplied.” 

Co-produced by Auerbach and Michels, Electrophonic Chronic features the full original line-up of The Arcs including Swift, Nick Movshon and Homer Steinweiss. The collection was announced last month to excitement from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Billboard and many more; lead single, “Keep On Dreamin’”, was named one of the best new songs of the week by a range of outlets from NPR Music to Guitar World. The Arcs also reunited with longtime visual collaborators Roboshobo and El Oms for Electrophonic Chronic. While El Oms illustrated the album art for the new project — as he did for Yours, Dreamily, in 2015 — Roboshobo illustrated and animated the videos for “Heaven Is A Place” and “Keep On Dreamin’”, as well as each of the forthcoming advance tracks.

Recorded before Swift’s passing, Electrophonic Chronic was sparked by the band’s mutual obsession with recording and crate-digging, taking inspiration from genres including vintage soul, old school garage and the space age pop of the 1960s. After a period where, as Michels puts it, “I think all of us couldn’t really listen to the music, couldn’t really face it and try to finish it,”Auerbach and Michels finally revisited those sessions during the pandemic last year; completing what they started with their late musical brother. 

“This new record is all about honoring Swift. It’s a way for us to say goodbye to him.” said Auerbach