All Heart

Baltimore-based Metal Hearts is made up of 18-year old Anar Badalov and 19-year old Flora Wolpert-Checknoff (alongside drummer and recording engineer Sam Leiber). The band manages to harness the misery and pain of the young adult years, turning it into something both raw and beautiful. Originally from Azerbaijan and Greece, respectively, Badalov and Wolpert-Checknoff met through a mutual friend/girlfriend. Before long the two were collaborating on songs by e-mail from their respective university campuses. Metal Hearts fuses Badalov and Wolpert-Checknoff’s male and female voices over layers of moody guitar melodies, drifting cello and saxophones, and the ever-present pulsations of the drum machine. At times the duo sounds a bit distant, forgoing mellow for melancholy. But somehow that makes these frail and seductive tunes all the more compelling. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear Metal Hearts had been making these quiet hymns of unhappiness for decades. This album is every high school kids’ dreary bedroom diary. Foothills Socialize