Hiroe

Philadelphia atmospheric proggers explain why they’re sitting on a wealth of unreleased material

Body//Formed in late 2020, Hiroe (pronounced hero-way), are a five-piece instrumental prog outfit from Philadelphia, PA.

“I started this back during the pandemic,” founding member, guitarist and pianist Eric Kusanagi explains of the bands origins. “I had stepped away from music for the better part of ten years because life takes over, but all of a sudden everyone’s dipping back into what they love.”

Kusanagi had formerly played guitar and sung in post-rock band Japanese Sunday, but finding himself with more time on his hands, he reached out to Mario Quintero, audio engineer and guitarist in the band Spotlights, and asked him to teach him how to record. “From there, I ran into the other founding member, Jill [Paslier, guitar], and she originally played bass for us. We’ve had a shifting lineup, but she and I have been the constants,” Kusanagi says. Around a year after Quintero taught him how to record, Kusanagi contacted Quintero to professionally record Hiroe’s debut EP, //Wrought//, and ended up receiving some valuable guidance. “‘Don’t just release this for the sake of releasing it, maybe send this around because it’s actually quite good,’ was what he said,” explains Kusanagi. “So I shared it out with some labels that I thought would be interested, and he shared it with Robin [Staps] from Pelagic. Robin seemed really stoked, he got back right away and gave us a window in the same year.”

Following the release of //Wrought//, the band had some “left over” tracks that would begin to form the basis of their debut album, //Wield//. The writing process began in late 2023, but was finished by April 2024, meaning Hiroe sat with their finished album for more than a year leading up to its release. “Our label are really supportive, however they do have a roster and they’re really smart about it. They’re not going to release so many records that they cannot really support, so they stick to two a month, and this is where we landed on the schedule. I probably could have done a better job of letting them know I was going to record something.”

Hiroe went into the studio for ten days straight during the recording of //Wield//, which is pretty standard for recording an album. While they were there though, they recorded two bodies of work. “We split them up. It made sense for two different releases. Part of it was just the volume of music we had at the time, and we felt really good about the material. Part of it, though, is the way music is consumed now. We live in an attention economy, where people listen to one thing that they’re told to listen to, and there’s no follow-up. I come from a generation where you open up CDs and vinyl, crack the cellophane, look at the art, look at the liner work, I look at what the band is thinking, and I listen to something from front to back because it is a curated experience. They painstakingly went through the whole process, so for someone to slice that up, that’s such a shame. The creation of music is a reflection of our humanity.” CF

Prog File

LINE-UP: Eric Kusanagi (Guitar), Jill Paslier (Guitar), Brian Kong (Guitar), Jon Seiler (Bass), Dan Sagherian (Drums)

SOUNDS LIKE: A crushing sonic wave of emotional atmospheric sound, rolling in to engulf you.

CURRENT RELEASE: //Wield// is out through Pelagic Records on June 20

WEBSITE: https://pelagic-records.com/artist/hiroe/

— Cheri Faulkner