Velvet Heart - Morningstar
Shoegaze has always possessed a natural relationship with memory. Guitars become blurred, voices seem to arrive from somewhere beyond the foreground and melodies can feel simultaneously present and strangely distant. On Morningstar, released on September 25, 2026, New Jersey quartet Velvet Heart use those qualities to explore relationships that survive less through physical presence than through the traces they leave behind.
Formed in New Jersey in 2023, Velvet Heart consists of Antonio Madrigal and Matthew Simonovich on guitars, Michael Vandervort on bass and Johnny Kalinowski on drums. The group describes its music with characteristic looseness as “shoegaze and whatever else,” which may actually be more useful than attempting to force them into a single category. Their music moves between shoegaze, dream pop, emo, alternative rock and post-hardcore, allowing the emotional directness of emo to exist inside increasingly atmospheric guitar arrangements.
Velvet Heart began releasing music with Dress in January 2024, followed by the Surrender EP and the singles “Sunfall” and “See Through You.” Their first full-length album, I Would Have Followed You, arrived in September 2025 and established both the group's musical identity and its strongly independent approach to recording.
That album was created under circumstances far removed from the mythology of expensive studios. Velvet Heart recorded, mixed and mastered the material themselves at home, describing the locations simply as a garden shed and two bedrooms, with Madrigal and Kalinowski involved in production. It is a detail that says quite a lot about the band's character. The intimacy of their music is not something added afterwards through production choices; it is connected to the environment in which the songs themselves have developed.
Their presence within the New Jersey scene has grown alongside those recordings, including an appearance at WTSR 91.3 FM's Fall 2025 Underground and a subsequent interview with the College of New Jersey station. The single “Stray (Carry On)”, released in February 2026, then provided another step towards the sound now explored on Morningstar.
At approximately sixteen minutes, Morningstar contains only four tracks, but its compact format gives it a strong sense of continuity. “Blurry,” “A Memory,” “Metro” and “Empty Frame” revolve around absence, distorted recollection and the difficulty of separating what has disappeared from what remains emotionally present.
The opening “Blurry” is also the longest track, extending beyond five minutes. Its central image concerns a relationship becoming increasingly difficult to reconstruct accurately, until faces, words and lies begin losing their distinction. It is an idea particularly well suited to shoegaze because the music itself can reproduce that instability. Detail exists, but its edges are softened and partially concealed by the surrounding sound.
“A Memory” pushes further into attachment and disappearance. Promises of protection and continued presence gradually become recollections of sleepless nights, leaving the song suspended between intimacy and something already lost. The emotional vocabulary comes partly from emo, but Velvet Heart increasingly place those feelings inside the wider spaces of dream pop and shoegaze rather than relying solely upon direct confrontation.
The brief “Metro” changes the structure of the EP completely. At 2 minutes and 45 seconds, it is both the shortest track and the only instrumental, creating a pause between the more explicitly emotional songs surrounding it. Without lyrics to determine its meaning, the piece becomes an atmospheric transition and gives Morningstar room to breathe before its final statement.
That conclusion arrives with “Empty Frame,” whose title contains perhaps the EP's most effective image. A person has disappeared, yet their photograph remains among familiar possessions. The frame therefore becomes both evidence of somebody's previous presence and a reminder of their absence, bringing together several ideas that recur throughout Velvet Heart's music: separation, memory and the uncomfortable persistence of emotional attachment.
These themes prevent the atmospheric production from becoming merely decorative. Velvet Heart are not using shoegaze simply because distorted guitars currently occupy such a prominent position within alternative music. The blurred textures have an emotional function, reflecting songs in which memories themselves are incomplete and the past becomes increasingly difficult to separate from the way it has subsequently been reconstructed.
The recording also maintains the band's independent character. Antonio Madrigal and Matthew Simonovich handle guitars, Michael Vandervort plays bass and Johnny Kalinowski drums, with Madrigal responsible for the mix and Connor Priest completing the mastering. The physical edition extends that DIY philosophy further, with only 50 hand-numbered CDs accompanied by artwork created by the band.
That small-scale presentation feels appropriate for music concerned with such personal subjects. There is something appealing about an EP exploring memories and disappearing relationships existing physically as a limited object that only a small number of people will possess.
Musically, Morningstar feels more like an evolution than a reinvention. The emo and post-hardcore foundations remain present, but Velvet Heart increasingly surround them with the floating textures of dream pop and shoegaze. Rather than replacing one identity with another, the band are discovering how naturally these different elements can coexist.
That distinction matters because Velvet Heart do not sound like a young band suddenly deciding to become shoegaze. Their atmospheric side has been developing across successive releases, while the emotional vulnerability associated with emo continues to provide much of the songwriting's centre of gravity. The guitars may increasingly disappear into haze, but the feelings underneath them remain unusually direct.
Morningstar consequently works as a compact portrait of a band becoming more confident about the space between its influences. Across four songs, Velvet Heart combine emo vulnerability, post-hardcore foundations, dream-pop atmosphere and shoegaze guitars without allowing any single element to completely define them.
Their Bandcamp description may still reduce all of this to “shoegaze and whatever else,” but Morningstar suggests that the “whatever else” is becoming just as important. For Velvet Heart, the most interesting territory increasingly lies in the blurred space between genres, just as these songs find their emotional weight somewhere between remembering somebody and finally accepting that they are gone.
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