The Happy Fits

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Recommended if you like: flipturn, Saint Motel, The Wrecks, Carter Vail, Friday Pilots Club, Mickey Darling

 

Over the course of ten tumultuous months, The Happy Fits’ world turned upside down in every way imaginable. Rather than let it break their stride, though, the acclaimed indie rockers leaned into the turmoil, transforming all the heartbreak and uncertainty they experienced into their most exhilarating, adventurous, and cathartic record yet.

 

“It feels like a whole new beginning,” says singer/cellist Calvin Langman. “We had to go through a lot of struggle to get here, but the band is stronger and healthier than ever before now, and I couldn’t be more excited about the chapter we’re about to embark on.”

 

Written and recorded amidst an emotional maelstrom that saw one founding member depart the band, another leave tour to get sober, and a third entering an era of self-renaissance, Lovesick is, as its title would suggest, a complicated reckoning with all the joy and pain that comes with opening your heart to the world. The songs are bold and fearless, reveling in the intensity of it all with radical vulnerability, and the performances are similarly, pairing blistering rock and roll energy and addictive pop hooks with sweeping orchestral arrangements and raw, revelatory lyrics. The collection also marks The Happy Fits’ first release with guitarists/vocalists Nico Rose and Raina Mullen, whose fresh perspective, innovative style, and undeniable chemistry with Langman and drummer Luke Davis manage to infuse the band’s sound with the unbridled energy of a debut record. The result is a poignant reflection on loss, grief, and renewal that touches on everything from Fleetwood Mac and ABBA to Arcade Fire and the Cars, an alternately triumphant and devastating meditation on change and growth that consistently reaches for beauty and transcendence, no matter how distant they may seem.

 

“After going through such a difficult stretch, I found myself wanting to get back to a more earnest kind of songwriting,” Langman explains. “Letting go of people who had meant so much really hurt, but at the same time, being able to live a more honest life and experience the world on my own terms brought a kind of freedom and joy I’d never known before.”

 

Founded in New Jersey by childhood friends Langman and Ross Monteith, The Happy Fits burst out of the gate in 2016 with Awfully Apeelin’, a self-released EP that climbed all the way to #5 on the Spotify USA Viral 50 and convinced the pair—along with Davis, who played drums on the record and soon joined as an official member—to drop out of school and pursue the band full time. In the years that followed, the group would go on to release three widely lauded full-length LPs (NPR’s Fresh Air hailed their music as “some of the freshest, catchiest pop music around right now”), rack up more than 300 million streams across platforms, land festival slots everywhere from Lollapalooza to Corona Capital in Mexico City, and develop a diehard fanbase across North America and Europe on the strength of their unique (how many bands feature a dynamo frontman with a cello strapped to his chest?) and rapturous live show.

 

While the band’s meteoric rise may have seemed like the stuff of dreams, challenges arose behind the scenes that threatened to bring it all to an abrupt halt. In early 2024, Monteith left the group, severing the creative partnership that had formed the band’s bedrock since the start. Later that year, Langman found himself forced to hold an intervention for Davis, whose struggles with alcohol had reached a breaking point.

 

“I wasn’t angry or frustrated or anything,” Davis recalls, “just sad because I felt like I’d let everyone down. But Calvin told me something that I needed to hear. He said that I shouldn't be doing this for anyone else, that I should be doing it for me, and that I needed to love myself. At the end of that conversation, we decided I would commit to AA and therapy.”

 

Down two members for the fall tour, Langman tapped Rose and Mullen to join him on the road.

 

“I’d been playing all over the LA music scene leading my own bands and touring as a hired gun for other artists’ projects, but when I got the call to join The Happy Fits, it didn’t just feel like another gig,” says Rose. “It felt like the possibility of something lasting. The addition of two new female voices and the unleashed power of two guitars to accompany what was already present and loved gave every song on the setlist a new life.”

 

The live show became more thrilling and dynamic than ever before, with Mullen and Rose not just filling in, but helping to redefine the sound of the band from the ground up. Surrounded for the first time by musicians who were just as eager to be onstage and elevate the music as he was, Langman found himself at a personal crossroads.

 

“The happiness I experienced in those first few weeks of the tour was profound,” he recalls. “But the more fulfilled I felt professionally, the more unfulfilled I felt at home, and I realized that, after seven years, my relationship had run its course.”

 

So Langman packed his things and moved out of the couple’s shared house in Easton, PA, relocating to Brooklyn, NY, where he learned how to live alone for the first time in his life. The transition was difficult, at times filling him with guilt and self-doubt, but, much as he’d discovered with the band, living honestly and authentically opened whole new horizons and put him in touch with parts of himself he didn’t even know existed. The songs came pouring out, and by the time Langman was ready to record, Davis was happy, healthy, and back from hiatus, ready to put his stamp on the new material along with Rose and Mullen, whose insight and inspiration helped push the recording sessions to new heights.

 

“Joining an already established band has its growing pains,” reflects Mullen, “but bringing two powerhouse musicians organically into the fold added a whole new dimension to the music with four-part harmonies and female voices. Incorporating our personal tastes and years of experience in different bands was vital to making this record and growing the sound and positive energy of the band. To have four people come together and all want to have artistic input is a new world for The Happy Fits.”

 

That sonic rebirth is obvious on Lovesick, which builds from a lo-fi whisper to an orchestral roar on brooding opener “Do You See Me?” Like much of the record, the song contemplates longing and desire, coming to terms with the inherent selfishness of love and our bottomless need for acceptance and approval. The explosive “Shake Me” begs to feel something—anything—in the face of emotional stagnation, while the muscular “Cruel Power” invites heartbreak, the if only for the rush. The riotous “Black Hole,” meanwhile, explores what happens when we surrender our sense of self to meet the needs of another, watching helplessly as a creative relationship that once brought such light and joy slowly transforms into a source of frustration and regret. “Sing to me / Sing through me / All I gave you and you never even knew me,” Langman belts over theatrical strings and guitars. ““Why do you lie? /Show me you’re human /Cause it’s been a while while while while / Since I’ve seen you prove it.”

 

“I learned through this experience that no matter how badly you may want to help someone, if they’re unwilling to accept it, you have to let go,” Langman explains. “Otherwise, you’ll just keep giving more and more of yourself until you get whittled down to nothing.”

 

Rather than fixate on what’s lost in those moments, however, Langman instead focuses his energy on the emotional and creative highs that come from connecting with others who give as much as they get, who and make you feel truly alive. The euphoric “Everything You Do” luxuriates in the bliss of infatuation; the dreamy “I Could Stare At You For Hours” surrenders to yearning and desperation; the buoyant “Sarah’s Song” celebrates silver linings and the rewards of platonic love; and the pulsating “Wild” throws caution and logic to the wind.

 

“For the first time since I was a teenager, I found myself falling in love again,” Langman recalls. “I felt passion everywhere I looked.”

 

Passion, in the end, is what Lovesick is all about. Not just romantic passion, but passion for life in all its messy, confusing glory: passion for growth, for healing, for heartbreak, for discovery, for destruction, for creation, for mistakes, for second chances. The Happy Fits have experienced it all these last ten months; now they’re ready to share it onstage with you every night.