The Head and the Heart: a 2011 live set, late but earned

Live at Neumos (2011) is a room, not a highlight reel. The Head and the Heart's Sub Pop release, out July 10, 2026, is a 13-track live set recorded at Neumos in 2011, and the tracklist does the arguing. The longest cuts get five minutes. The shortest, the 1:52 opener Cats and Dogs, is gone almost before it starts, which is the shape of a band working a crowd in real time.

The middle of the set carries the record. Ghosts, Lost In My Mind, Down In The Valley and Rivers and Roads each run past four and a half minutes, which gives the songs room to stretch. A live album works when you can feel the room waiting for a hook, and these runtimes say the songs were built to fill that wait. The sequencing is less kind. Heaven Go Easy On Me (4:46) drops directly into Lost In My Mind (5:26), and ten minutes of similar gear in one block asks the listener to do too much of the work. The detour the set needs, T Is For Texas (Blue Yodel No. 1), only shows up at track 10, as a break in a run of songs that has already started to blur.

As a 2026 release of a 2011 recording, the album has a strange clock. It is what it says it is: the band at Neumos, recorded live, released through Sub Pop. T Is For Texas is the only real swerve, and a good one. It sits apart from the rest of the set, and the room feels wider for it.

The result is not essential. It is a solid, honest live set, and 3.5 is the score for the tape rather than the memory. The tape does what it says, and that is enough.

The tracklist

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