The Headless gets heady in series of singles

For Flint’s The Headless, space rock isn’t just a genre. The fairly new band, formed just last year, is shooting for the stars.

“I’ve always loved really over-the-top rock acts that build a lot of imagery and strangeness into their stuff,” founder and frontman Andy Lenox said. “That’s the one thing I think is missing from rock ‘n’ roll from my era. I want Ziggy Stardust and Captain Fantastic. I want there to be a storyline and a whole lore to it. I want to fend off rumors that I’m a space wizard.”

The band has dropped two singles so far, “Another Cloth” in July and “Cast into the Firmament” last month. Each song is a vignette contributing to a larger story.

“As I was writing these songs, they were sort of filling out this story in my head of this character who, much like the Buddha, is an oligarch prince who slowly discovers the ill effects that his way of life and his delusions are having on the world, and the process of shedding that self,” Lenox said. “I always enjoyed digging into the lore of other bands and finding little Easter eggs and trying to piece together how each thing built to that story, and that’s sort of what I’m doing. It’s like each song fits at a different part in this epic.”

The songs are recorded by Marc Jacob Hudson at his Rancho Recordo studio in the woods near Fenton. Hudson has worked with numerous major artists, including Cursive, Taking Back Sunday, AWOLNATION, Saves the Day, Bright Eyes, Sunny Day Real Estate, Cold Joys and Against Me!

“He’s a friend and neighbor of mine, and I started taking these songs to him and flushing them out in the studio,” Lenox said. “One thing led to another, and it kept getting more and more serious. And here we are.”

The Headless’ live shows are equally as imaginative as its music. At the band’s second and third performances later this month, Lenox will be in full costume.

“The onstage persona is this garish, over-the-top character wearing black and gold and feathers, just completely oblivious to the damage they’ve done to everything. It’s grandiose and over the top and probably too heady,” he said.

Over time, Lenox hopes to build the show up even more, into an “over-the-top arena rock experience.”

“The bassist is really interested in lighting and automation. We don’t have any of that ready for these shows, but he’s buying big lighting rigs, and we’re hooking it up. We’re very much approaching it like theater kids in terms of, like, how do we orchestrate this whole stage show?” he said. “I want this time next year for it to be kind of an over-the-top thing. A lot of the lyric videos that we’re making are intended to also be video that plays on stage.”

Lenox spent much of his youth playing in a punk band called Diver, which disbanded in the late 2000s. After a reunion in the mid-2010s, he quit music in an attempt to get his life together and “become a professional adult.”

“Coming out of COVID, I was really estranged from music. I hadn’t really touched it for five years, and I was like, I need to like make a concerted effort to get back into it because there was something missing that whole time,” he said. “So, I called up some folks from the old Diver days, and we started jamming together. At first, we didn’t have any kind of serious thing in mind, just wanting to play. And it got more and more serious.”

Eventually, The Headless was born. The music, described as a mix of space rock and alternative metal, is inspired by the music Lenox listened to in high school and beyond — “heavy and guitar-driven, layered and atmospheric under big vocal hooks.”

“Older grunge and shoegaze and space-rock stuff,” Lenox said. “We were learning covers at first, just for something to do. Going back to that kind of stuff really kicked off a lot of the writing that we’re doing now.”

Lenox would like to play shows every six to eight weeks, “just to keep us fresh.” For now, The Headless has the two September shows booked, as well as another Nov. 28 in Ann Arbor. The theme is “party like it’s 2002,” complete with CD and tape burning.

“All the bands are going to burn CDs, and if you bring your own mixtapes, you can trade with the bands. We’re gonna put rarities and demos and weird stuff on those. It’s gonna be exclusive weird crap that you wouldn’t be able to get any other way,” Lenox said.

The band plans to keep releasing singles throughout the fall and winter, leading to a full-length album likely next year.

“The way the music industry works right now is really weird. Bands are built on singles now, and because of the way social media is, and the Spotify algorithm and algorithmic content recommendation engines, you need kind of a steady stream of releases and content and attention, and it has to be this sustained thing,” Lenox said. “Long story short, we’re gonna keep releasing singles every six to eight weeks because that’s what keeps eyeballs on us. I can already kind of see it working. We only have two singles out, and it’s already starting to snowball a little bit, which is really cool.”