“When I got my driver’s license and could start going to shows more, I found myself going to local hardcore shows and was into that scene for a while and played with those bands growing up,” Egan says via phone. His band, Heart Attack Man, heads out on the road with Neck Deep this week and its terrific new album, Thoughtz & Prayerz, drops on Friday. Heart Attack Man’s tour with Neck Deep comes to the Agora on Nov. 28.
“As I got older, I got more in touch with the part of me that appreciates solid hooks and melodies, and I wanted to try something new after all that,” Egan continues. “I also had six concussions from sports, and so I wanted to play something a little softer to save myself from the head injuries.”
“Something softer” came in the form of Heart Attack Man, which formed in 2013. The band’s pop-punk approach has much in common with acts such as Blink-182, and its full-length debut, 2017’s The Manson Family, even received some national attention.
“That was our first full-length, and we wanted to shop it around to some labels,” says Egan when asked about the album. “We self-financed it and recorded it in six days. That was all we could finance on our own. It was pretty crazy. We didn’t sleep much at all. We would sleep at the studio at times. We were pushing 20-hour tracking days. It was very hectic, and looking back on it, I don’t know how we did it. We blinked a couple of times, and we were done.”
For its next album, Fake Blood, the band signed to Triple Crown Records/You Did This and had two-and-a-half weeks to record.
“It was much more relaxed,” says Egan, who adds that the band seeks to evolve with each subsequent album. “My process has been take the elements that I think were working the best with the last release and either perfect them or introduce new elements. In my head, it all feels like a successive change to me. We’re building momentum and either perfecting it or trying something new.”
With Thoughtz & Prayerz, the band wanted to reintroduce its heavy hardcore side.
“That brings it full circle,” says Egan. “Back when I started the band, I wanted to get away from that for my own safety, but now I kind of miss the energy and the aggression. The music itself is very cathateric. Fake Blood had moments that were more charged like that.”
Thoughtz & Prayerz‘s first single, “Pitch Black,” is more on the melodic side of things, but that’s the exception rather than the rule on the EP. With its driving guitars and barked vocals, the Fugazi-like “Puke” represents the hardcore element Egan says the band tries to stress on the album.
“When we were tracking, we wanted to incorporate more of a hardcore influence, but we didn’t want it to be indecipherable,” he says. “Some hardcore bands get so into it that you can’t understand what they’re saying. I love that kind of stuff personally, but for us, I wanted it to be heavy but still decipherable.”
The track “Cool 2 Me” even ventures into spoken word territory.
“That one is weird because there’s a heavy element to it, but it’s still experimental to us. It’s not a typical structure for us, but I was happy with what came of it.”
Though the album is just coming out now, the band started recording in 2020 at the Barbershop in New Jersey and then wrapped up a few “loose ends” at a studio in Toledo in the fall of that year.
“We didn’t record it all at once,” says Egan. “We spread it out more. Last year was a wild ride. We wanted to stay busy and hit the ground running when things were somewhat back to normal.
The upcoming tour with Neck Deep was supposed to happen at the end of 2020, but the dates got bumped because of the pandemic.
“I can’t wait [to tour],” says Egan. “It feels like so long since we’ve played a show. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that long. There will be bands that go on hiatus for much longer, but this is the longest I’ve gone without playing shows since I’ve started playing shows when I was 13. It’s been strange but a nice reset. I got really into fitness. I have better lung capacity and can sing better. I genuinely feel like I have better control over my voice. It helped me appreciate things more.” 
This article appears in Oct 6-19, 2021.
