Noel Heroux’s Hooray for Earth may have had a jolly name, but towards the end of his nearly decade-long tenure in the band, Heroux didn’t exactly feel like cheering. In fact, his stagnation in the Sub Pop group sent him into a tailspin of depression that affected both his personal life and his creativity. But thankfully, by reinventing himself as the one-man indie-pop band Mass Gothic – fittingly best known for the college radio hit “Every Night You’ve Got to Save Me” – the troubled artist was able to turn everything around and make his best music yet.

“Before I started the Mass Gothic thing, towards the end of my prior band I definitely got into, like, a two-year-thing of just depression. Let’s just call it what it is: depression, depression, depression. It’s just there, it’s inherently in me, but it was compounded by the fact that
I wasn’t really happy with what I was doing,” Heroux tells Yahoo Music, sitting on an Austin porch after playing a stripped-down session at South by Southwest.

“I felt like I was kind of backed into a corner creatively — so that just makes [the depression] worse. So when I figured out that I could choose to not do that anymore, it lightened things up quite a bit.”

Now, with Mass Gothic’s self-titled Sub Pop release, Heroux says, “OK, here’s the first time that I have lyrics that actually mean
something. Because for years before, I was kind of doing word association and just saying, ‘Whatever, I don’t care what it means.’ It was more about syllables and fitting them in.” This time, the Mass Gothic lyrical theme was basically, “Here’s all the s— that I just went through in the past couple years. It was just stream-of-consciousness, just writing in my notebooks, and lot of that stuff came out.”

Much of the confessional album – written and recorded at home on a four-track with no constraints, pressures, or expectations – was inspired by his marriage to musician and collaborator Jessica Zambri (of Zambri and Solvey). But Heroux stresses: “It’s not like a ‘relationship problems album.’ It’s more like I had so much trouble with the depression and all this stuff, and she was just like, ‘All right, let’s crush it!’

“She was there, and patient — and if anybody is in a relationship with somebody who’s depressed, or if you’re the depressed person in a relationship, then you know that that takes a toll on both people, really big-time. And she was such a trooper.” Heroux has previously described the album as “a really dramatic, loud apology/thank you note” to his supportive spouse.

Loosely named after the Massachusetts-bred songsmith’s favorite book, Denis Johnson’s Already Dead: A California Gothic, Heroux
and Mass Gothic make brainy, cathartic indie-pop that’s the masses really ought to hear. Enjoy their SXSW performances now.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.