Scottish Act The Ninth Wave Announce Upcoming Hiatus; Share New Single “Hard Not To Hold You” From Upcoming Album ‘Heavy Like A Headache’

Glasgow’s The Ninth Wave released their new track ‘Hard Not To Hold You’, the final teaser of their upcoming  second album, Heavy Like A Headache. Set to release on March 18th, the Galsgow band have also shared that they will be going on hiatus following the release and their three upcoming dates in Manchester, London and Glasgow.

‘Hard Not To Hold You’ explores sentiments of  helplessness, loneliness and being separated from the one you love, though partnered with a beat driven accompaniment that lifts the song away from its heavier subject matter. The chorus explicitly hones in on those sentiments, against building synthesizers and crashing drums: “It’s hard not to hold you and I’m sad to say / That I can’t console you when there’s nothing to face.” 

Accompanying the new single release, the band shared: “How heavy do you let your head ache before you let yourself break? Songs for scraping under the surface, for starting again, songs for leaving. Elaborating our fragility into intensity – expanding beyond our infancy” – posing the questions to their listeners that seem to have pervaded the song’s creation. 

Produced by the band themselves and mixed by Max Heyes, Heavy Like A Headache explores feelings of grief, anxiety, anger and loneliness, as you might expect from listening to this latest release. If there’s one thing that stands out more than anything in the new album though, it’s The Ninth Wave’s refusal to be pigeonholed into a specific genre. Constantly developing and pushing their sound into exciting new territory, sonically, the group continues to challenge expectations and preconceptions of their music.

About the upcoming hiatus, the four piece shared the following statement via Instagram regarding their future plans:

Hello! We are so so so excited to release our second album. We love it a lot and we hope you do too. We poured a lot of love, effort and emotion into it and we couldn’t be prouder of the end result. It’s our strongest body of songs without a doubt. Hope you’re ready for it!

On a sad but also happy note, we’ve decided that after this album is out and after the three celebration gigs in March, we’re gonna take an extended break from The Ninth Wave. That means these gigs in March will be our last as a band for a long time (maybe ever!).

We are all still best of pals and love what we have created together. However, we’ve been going full pelt for the last six years and we feel like it’s time to give the band a breather. We also all have other projects that we’re keen to explore and taking a breather from the band will give us all the opportunity to do that. The Ninth Wave has given us some of the best times and we’ve met some of the loveliest people we’ve known throughout it all.

So, these gigs in March are going to be extremely fucking special celebrations. There’ll be laugh, tears, cuddles, dancing, the whole bloody lot. We’re going to be playing a bunch of songs from the new album, as well as a load of the family favourites and GrEaTeSt HiTz. You absolutely CANNOT miss out, imagine the regret oh my god!!! The tour that we did at the end of 2021 reminded us of how much we fucking love playing live and seeing every one of you going for it and feeling the same feelings as us is something special.

Love to you all and we hope you love Heavy Like a Headache as much as we do. See you in March for one last dance.

Haydn, Millie, Kyalo and Calum

Watch the highlight montage for “Hard Not To Hold You” below:

Live Dates:

16 MARCH – Manchester, YES Pink Room

17 MARCH – London, Oslo

19 MARCH – Glasgow, SWG3

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