Jadu Heart have unlocked a new chapter of creative freedom

Jadu Heart’s latest album, Post Heaven, was written in the wake of a breakup between the group’s two core members. Far from spelling disaster for the London experimentalists, the split opened up unexpected new avenues for exploration, reinvention and release.

“I think the band is ultimately what broke us up, but it’s also the best thing we ever did,” says Diva Jeffrey, co-founder of experimental outfit Jadu Heart. “What – the breakup, or the band?” Alex Headford, her counterpart, immediately bats back. “The band,” Jeffrey clarifies.

The nine-year-long romantic relationship at the core of Jadu Heart may have ended, but the creative relationship they formed as students has proved more enduring. Last year, while living in the London house they still shared, they balanced the tortuous practicalities of breaking up with the writing of their fourth album. “We’re in this bedroom of our house that we still have three months left on the lease,” Jeffrey recalls. “We’re writing this song at 11 at night on the guitar, and it’s so emotional and intense. We cried many times.”

The song in question, Post Romance, is the centrepiece of Post Heaven and begins with a Beach House-style arpeggiated synth that soon melts into the background as a yearning, nostalgic guitar line takes the lead. “The look in your eye says/ More than friends/ We won’t let it die/ I should go/ But I know this might be the last time/ I hold your hand,” Jeffrey sings, with a close-to-the-mic intimacy that’s just a touch more powerful than a whisper.

As with any breakup, the pair had to establish new boundaries and walls of separation between each other. But with the entirety of their adult lives, careers and creative expression so tightly intertwined, breaking up the band as well as their relationship never came into question. “We needed something – it gave us a purpose,” Jeffrey says. “Being in a studio and making music together was the only time anything felt normal. I could get into a flow state and forget what was going on for a few hours. It was only when we left and I was driving home when it was like: ‘Fuck, this is so horrible.’”

Jeffrey is sitting next to Headford as they dial in from Nashville, Tennessee. The pair are currently on tour in the US with Fontaines D.C., couch surfing between fans’ houses to make the 21-date venture more financially feasible. Both are clearly still in lockstep with each other’s rhythms, finishing sentences and offering clarifications to one another’s thoughts in ways that only people who really understand each other can.

“I actually think it would have been really scary to have gone through that breakup and not had something that at least tethered us together a bit,” Headford says. “We were being very kind to each other, caring with each other, and that helped – as it usually does.”

Jeffrey and Headford first met at university, where they both studied music at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (BIMM). A connection was apparent immediately, not least when they began working together on an assignment that turned into something else entirely. “It was a really boring exercise, like ‘the life cycle of a fly’ or something like that,” Jeffrey explains. “And then, because me and Alex are extra tapped, we decided to create a whole fucking universe with stories and music about cursed children who go into a cave, find a cursed NPC and turn into crystal beasts.”

Those cursed children – Dina and Faro – were played by Jeffrey and Headford themselves, and as part of the project, they created goblin-esque masks that straddled folklore and horror. As Jadu Heart got signed – to Mura Masa’s Anchor Point Records – and grew their fanbase, the story they had built stuck. “The masks represented these monsters that these kids turn into, and they got ostracised and separated from society,” Jeffrey continues. “When I look back, we felt very separated from reality, and we felt very ‘other’.”

This was how they presented themselves for their earliest records. Namely the 2016 EPs Wanderflower and Ezra’s Garden – where each song corresponded to a different chapter in Dina and Faro’s fictional lives, via a cocktail of Jai Paul-esque psych-flavoured indietronica and trip-hop – and the 2019 full-length, Melt Away. They ditched the masks for 2020’s Hyper Romance and 2023’s Derealised when they felt the idea had grown stale: “I never meant to be in a concept band,” Headford says. “After the first album, we were like: ‘Why am I putting all my time and effort into a concept band when I just want to sing songs from my perspective?’”

Revealing themselves as Diva and Alex – as opposed to Dina and Faro – opened up new avenues of expression for the pair, and their music changed accordingly: moving away from warmer, more padded-out synths to embrace the hazy growls of distorted guitars and off-beat, reverbed-out synths. Their live sets began to swagger, too. “It gave us so much confidence – the weight that it carried before kind of lifted. Like now, when we were trying to interact with somebody live, we could actually see them,” Headford says, before Jeffrey adds: “It was crazy. Like, ‘Oh, this is how normal people play music – this makes sense.’”

A few months after they returned from touring Derealised, they recognised that the toll of relentless cycles of touring and recording had become too great. “We had so much pressure, and we didn’t have day jobs or studios where we could be separated,” Jeffrey says. “We wrote the first two albums in our bedroom, which we shared together and lived in. I think that made our relationship suffer.”

Yet, as breakups often do, it gave the pair a newfound – if bittersweet – sense of freedom. Jeffrey and Headford translated this into the music they were writing and producing. “We’d been trying to think of a folk record for a while,” Headford explains. “And we’d just broken up and were like: ‘Is this the right time for a folk record? Or is it the time for us to just have as much fun as we can with the production, and not worry about trying to please anyone for the first time in our career?’”

Writing the album in “fuck it” mode, there’s a joyous lack of constraint evident throughout Post Heaven, which was recorded along with their bandmates Theo Maguire and Nina Dembinska in 2024. The freedom shows: it’s easily their loosest record yet. There are traces of that initial folk concept in places – the guitar and flute samples on Shake Your Ass, for instance – but these small moments melt into a drift of beatless ambience and soaring shoegaze riffs. U sees the pair embrace Magnetic Man-like, stadium-sized electronics, while on Lambs.exe, a 2-step shuffle dissolves into a flurry of IDM-esque hi-hats before the track’s breakdown leaves just Headford’s voice and an acoustic guitar. Morris On, this ain’t. 

“I remember thinking about SoundCloud beats and how much that meant to me when I first started to produce, and how that culture got lost as soon as we got into the world of ‘pop’ music,” Headford says. “We reconnected to the idea of just making fun beats and tunes.”

The rush of ideas feels aligned with our current moment, where prolonged exposure to a firehose of information creates that uncanny sense of being utterly unmoored. The band have even been labelled as “post music” by some critics. Headford partially agrees. “The way we receive culture is such a mash nowadays,” he says. “We’re just mashing together whatever genre we want to listen to on the day, and whatever we’re interested in, with our artistry becoming apparent in all the tiny details that match that together.” In the case of Post Heaven, everything is bound by a sense of yearning and a winding thread of introspection, even at its heaviest. “The morphine dripped malaise/ On Sunday morning blooms/ And I don’t wanna attain anything more than why I was made,” Headford sings on AUX.

More importantly, making Post Heaven was about finding release in one of the lowest periods they’ve ever experienced. “What we went through together was probably the worst year of my life, and the album represents everything good that came out of it,” Jeffrey says, as we wrap up the conversation. “I can look back and have a fucking vinyl, and this tour, and everything that we’ve written together.”

Despite the split in their personal lives, the pair still see Jadu Heart as something that will continue to develop, with the musical connection even tighter than before. “I want to release some boukie folk music or some shit when we’re in our 60s,” Headford says, before Jeffrey finishes his sentence: “I wanna write 20 albums, 30 albums – just keep them coming.”