Originally formed in 1987 by Buzz McCoy(who had recently relocated from Boston) and Groovie Mann, the duo sought to create a worthy musical accompaniment that could be used as a soundtrack to trashy B-movies. The duo's initial project was to make a movie (in the style of Russ Meyer and John Waters) to be named "My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult." The movie never got off the ground, but McCoy and Mann used the aborted movie's title for the name of their just-formed group, as their over-the-top stage show was best described as "sensory overload". Signing on with Chicago's renowned industrial dance label Wax Trax!, the Thrill Kill Kult issued several releases between 1989 and 1991: a self-titled EP, plus the full-lengths I See Good Spirits and I See Bad Spirits, Kooler Than Jesus, Confessions of a Knife, and Sexplosion! By this time, the group had attracted the attention of Interscope Records, which signed up the Thrill Kill Kult and reissued Sexplosion!, which had spawned perhaps the group's best-known song, "Sex on Wheelz" (the track would also be featured in director Ralph Bakshi's animated movie Cool World. In 2004 the Ryko label acquired most of Wax Trax!'s releases, including early albums from the Kult. That same year they reissued the band's first three albums and released a new compilation, The Best of TKK, along with a set of remixes named Diamonds & Daggerz. In 2010 they introduced their own label Sleazbox with the album Death Threat plus the remix/re-recordings collection Sinister Whisperz: The Wax Trax Years. In addition to their own releases, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult has contributed tracks to several movie soundtracks, including Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, Greg Araki's Nowhere, and the hit flick The Crow (in the latter of which the group made a cameo appearance); and over the years, has toured with such renowned (and similarly styled) bands as Siouxie and the Banshees, Lords of Acid, EMF, and Marilyn Manson.

Heavy Halo is conflict: darkness vs. light, noise vs. melody, machine vs. skin and bone.

It is wide-eye idealism dragged down to the dirt by harsh reality.

Heavy Halo is a Goth-Grunge blood-pact forged in the NYC underground between McKeever and Gosteffects.

The band takes the spirit and existential angst of Alternative and Industrial and passes it through the shattered prism of the internet age, refracted and made new.

Jagged guitars and raw electronics explode over gut-rattling 808's. But at their core, Heavy Halo are melody junkies, lacing tracks with shameless hooks and McKeever's 100% unfiltered vocals.

As direct as the music is, the origin of the band is anything but straightforward…

McKeever spent years studying composition at Columbia University while playing every sweat-soaked DIY venue possible. Gosteffects was banging out weaponized techno at illegal raves across the country. Finally, the two met and immediately felt something in common: both would be dead if they didn't create music. 

But Heavy Halo wouldn't come together until after McKeever went through a chaotic spiral that sent him to New Orleans, Los Angeles, a psychiatric ward, and back. 

They regrouped in New York’s pandemic wasteland, holed up in Gosteffect's studio built in a former hospital. Driven by desperation and claustrophobia, clawing up the walls as they closed in, they ended up crafting the most emotional songs either had ever recorded. The resulting debut album was pure catharsis. 

After releasing the self-titled LP on Negative Gain, the duo exploded onto the NYC live scene, performing relentlessly at venues like Elsewhere, LPR, and TV Eye. In just a year after putting out their 1st single they were already ranking on lists of “Hardest Working Bands in NYC” and “Unmissable New York Live Acts” as well as being covered in publications such as Alt Press, Post-Punk.com, and New Noise. 

Feeling the pressure to annihilate any possibility of a sophomore slump, the band dug even deeper inward to write, record, and produce the follow up record themselves. They aimed for even further extremes, reaching towards apparent opposites: aggression & beauty, violence & romance, heaviness & melody – doubling down on their philosophy that songs need conflict to exist. This process almost broke them, but the resulting album, “Damaged Dream,” surpasses the debut in every way. The dream may be damaged but it’s not dead in the water quite yet. 

Heavy Halo is getting up after life beats the shit out of you and spitting back in its face. 

In all this conflict, Heavy Halo is the revenge.