High Wire Act accidentally formed in 2023 because of drumming. Having stepped in to rescue Tom Slatter with drums, Mike Orvis and Tom decided to make music together. The band, High Wire Act was the result, and To Risk Your Heart, recorded from late 2024 to early 2025, is their debut album. They describe it as being a “loose concept album”, concerning mental health related themes, such as:
– imposter syndrome
– grief
– introversion
– escaping toxic relationships
Tom observes that many musicians have experienced, and been influenced by mental health issues. He wondered, “What would music inspired by that be like if it came from a healthier place?”
This album is replete with splendid examples of firmly-clamp-your-teeth-together-and-gurn-in-a-mosh-pit, hooky riffagery. Riffs aside, there is depth to the lyrics. Delivered in Tom’s unique, clean choral style, there is insight into the struggles, small and not so small, that many, many people cope with throughout their lives. For example, and I’m no expert, my interpretation of Sacred Waste Ground is that we are looking at the World through the eyes of an introvert, exhibiting symptoms of ADHD. They are incapable of switching off their thoughts, sometimes until dawn, struggling with the passage of time, not knowing how to cope with the simple question “How’s your day”, that people use as a substitute for a good old fashioned “hello”! Even if I got this wrong, it clearly is a thought-provoking song, as is the rest of the album.
Then there’s Darker Fall The Days. This song seems to describe the onset of anxiety and depression.
I Have A Mask deals with imposter syndrome:
And on that mask I drew a smile
And with that smile I stole some friends
And with those stolen friends I got myself a life”.
I associate the opening track, To Risk Your Heart with the eighth song on the album, To Escape Your Satellites. Both songs suggest a similar story to me, told by a victim of their partner and trapped in an abusive relationship. They despair at having committed themselves to someone who has revealed that they are not who they appeared to be on who they have “wasted sweetness”. The relationship they hoped for and invested so much of themselves in is a nightmare, being the absolute opposite of what they anticipated. The former song contains the lyric:
Fruit is falling
Wasting sweetness
And you’re here to risk your heart”
And the latter:
“I’m the idiot, so damn weak and so polite
Free for them to take
Take is what they did with no real oversight
They dug their feelers in…”
When The Lights Go Out is my favourite track, with hooks galore. I picked up my bass guitar and played along with it for between 20 and 120 minutes!
That’s proper single-worthy material. In fact, gentlemen, I think you may have just released your first Number One!
Seeing as The Progressive Aspect has the word “Progressive” in it, and most people just say “Prog”, this is the bit where I ask:
Is it Prog? Well, there are possibly some weird time signatures, and High Wire Act boldly scream, “in your face!” to established song formats. But there is no Mellotron or eBow, making High Wire Act somewhat prog-adjacent. I think the tag “prog adjacent newish metal grunge” is more suitable, if a less catchy descriptive phrase.
Mike Orvis, the band’s drummer, says the album is, “an eclectic grungy collection of mad ideas about feelings”.
I’m not one for hyperbole, but if you want any old album exploring feelings, then I’d imagine there are thousands of billions of touch-feely albums of that ilk, by young ladies with vocal fry, and, I’d imagine, young men with loopers and battered acoustic guitars. But To Risk Your Heart is unashamedly a rock album, less battered guitar and vocal gymnastics and more distorted Gibson SGs and big drums, and it deals with difficult and serious subject matter in a far more visceral way. So, To Risk Your Heart does not feel like a gentle, protective embrace. High Wire Act tackle the subject matter head on. There’s no pussyfooting here, this isn’t a touch-feely album, so you might be conscious or a rather narrow spectrum in terms of the dynamic properties from song to song and within the songs themselves. And that’s OK.
To Risk Your Heart is written and performed with absolute commitment to its (sort of) concept album subject matter. The performance and production on the album is spot on. The mix is great, there are lovely bits of sound design sprinkled subtly over these tracks, supplying us with additional atmosphere. The songs are thought-provoking and appropriate to the subject matter, and I really enjoyed reviewing them.
I suspect that we can all identify with areas of the lyrical content of these songs. They may well highlight at least one thing, one property of our thought processes or circumstances, encapsulating a description, even a definition of who we think we are, and how we relate to the World. You wouldn’t be alone if you thought this. It’s important that if you think you’re experiencing any of the issues that you talk to someone. You could start: HERE
As an aside, an apology to Mike Orvis. I’m not familiar with his work with his synth-pop alter-ego, GlitterWølf, or with doom rock band Colbrande, so forgive me if this review is somewhat Slatter-centric. But I just discovered that producer/engineer Graham Waller, who is pretty much a neighbour of mine and a FaceBook friend, worked with Mike on Mike’s GlitterWølf project. It’s a small world!
In summary: Buy this album because it’s good.
TRACK LISTING
01. To Risk Your Heart (4:57)
02. Sacred Waste Ground (4:49)
03. I Have A Mask (5:31)
04. Bleed Me (5:02)
05. Darker Fall The Days (5:55)
06. Traitor Thoughts (5:11)
07. When The Lights Go Out (3:37)
08. To Escape Your Satellites (7:47)
09. This Is Not An Ending (4:20)
Total Time – 47:09
MUSICIANS
Mike Orvis & Tom Slatter – Drums and other stuff respectively
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Independent
Country of Origin: UK
Date of Release: 5th December 2025
LINKS
High Wire Act – Facebook | Bandcamp
Mike Orvis (GlitterWølf) – Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube | X | Instagram
Tom Slatter – Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube | Instagram
