Kerosene Heights have officially announced their new LP titled "Blame It On The Weather" which will be released on SideOneDummy on August 15, 2025. The album will contain 12 brand new tracks, and to mark the announcement, they're sharing the album's lead single "New Tattoo." Of the new single singer/guitarist Chance Smith says: "'New Tattoo' made it onto the album at the very last minute. I wrote it 2 weeks before we left for the studio and we had never played it together prior to recording it. I got married this year and the song is about that. I’m asking to be a permanent part of you for the rest of your life, like a tattoo."

About the new LP guitarist Justin Franklin says “From the inception of our band to this album, you can really see how it's developed from Chance writing songs to everyone putting our own things on top of that. With each release we've done since our first EP [2022’s no more bad dreams], it's been cool to see how everybody has been able to inject a little bit more of their ideas and their own musical identity and personality into a lot of these songs. To me, this release is our band really making a statement.”

“Leaving felt like the beginning of the era that we're in right now as a band,” says Smith, “and this feels like the record we've all been wanting to put out since the band got started. For me at least, I feel like I hit a lot of marks that I hadn't yet.”

It’s a fact of life that nothing ever stays the same. Everybody’s life is in a constant state of flux, just like the world itself, and anything can change at any given moment. The members of Kerosene Heights have been thinking about that a lot recently, especially after Hurricane Helene ripped through their home state of North Carolina, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. So, when writing the 12 songs that make up the band’s second full-length, Blame It On The Weather, a lot of those thoughts and circumstances seeped into them, manifesting themselves in this record. “It was a theme that came up on its own,” explains vocalist and guitarist Chance Smith. “There's a lot of things based on transition and change, as well as talk about the weather specifically. That's been an omnipresent thing in our lives with the hurricane, and it felt like it fit the mood and the throughline of the record.”

Recorded by Billy Mannino (Oso Oso, Prince Daddy & The Hyena, Macseal) at Two Worlds Studio in Queens, NY, Blame It On The Weather certainly showcases just how good the chemistry of the band is now. There were certainly hints of it on Leaving, but a little extra time to be together has truly solidified it. From opener “Sunsetting”—a beautifully, hopelessly romantic but pained song that lives up to its title—through to the renewed hope of the boisterous, cacophonic closing title track, this is a record that flourishes from the connection between its members. It sounds, at times, chaotic and messy in the way that life is chaotic and messy, but really it’s incredibly precise and controlled.

Buoyed by that free-flowing chemistry of collaboration—something Bennis puts down to the “magic of Asheville”—the band have crafted a truly exceptional second record. Not only does it succeed in Kerosene Heights’ tongue-in-cheek mission of resurrecting the ghost of acclaimed but short-lived emo screamers Grown Ups, it also goes far beyond that. In fact, it carves out the band’s own unique place within the scene through a series of devastating emotional blows that pick you up even as they throw you to the floor—a kind of ragged euphoria.

RIYL: Charmer, Hot Mulligan, Arm's Length