A Dirty Dozen with MATIC BLAGONIČ from HEI’AN – October 2025

Photo credit: Grega Stamenović

According to a recent press release: “Hei’An are a five-piece post-metalcore band from Slovenia whose unique sound blends elements from various metal, rock, pop, and electronic music styles. Their deeply emotional and impactful songs are packed with intimate moments and massive segments. Hei’An released their debut album, imago, via SAOL in November 2022. To follow up on the album’s success, the band flew to the world-famous EastWest Studios in Los Angeles to record live versions of four songs from imago with a string quartet from the L.A. Philharmonic. The resulting EP, Live at EastWest Studios, came out in October 2023. Hei’An’s upcoming sophomore full-length album, Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye, was produced by the band and Randy Slaugh (Architects, The Amity Affliction), mixed by Joseph McQueen (From Ashes to New, Bad Wolves) and Zakk Cervini (Bring Me the Horizon, Architects), and mastered by Ted Jensen.” We get Matic to discuss new music, influences, and more…

1. Tell us a little about your latest release. What might a fan or listener not grab the first or second time they listen through? Are there any hidden nuggets you put in the material or that only diehard fans might find?

Well, overall, Kiss Our Ghosts Goodbye is a very sonically interesting album with a lot of elements from different genres and styles fused together, but to work well within the modern metalcore / post-metalcore umbrella, while still keeping the unique Hei’An core sound very much alive. Thematically, it’s not a concept album per se, but the songs do follow a very clear common thread, that can be broken up into three parts: the first is my sexuality (I publicly came out as bisexual a while ago and on a few of the songs I ‘discuss’ the issues within the society I live in and even when it came to some former close friends and family members that came as a direct result of that), the second one is my MS and depression (I got diagnosed with MS between the first album and this one and quite a few songs talk about the uncertainty and hopelessness that also led to severe depressive episodes that I’ve had to go through as a direct result of my condition – doing super well now, though, the disease is in remission at the time of writing!), and the third theme is one of directly addressing different sociopolitical factors (mainly our decaying society and how it seems a lot of progress we’ve managed to collectively achieve through the years is now being rapidly undone with the rise of bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, racism and all-around baseless hate in all aspects of society lately). In that way, each song on the album kind of addresses a ‘ghost’ (past trauma, whether completely my own or coming directly from the outside world” that I’ve had to deal with, and through the course of creating this album, tried to ‘kiss goodbye’ (so work through in a cathartic and therapeutic manner). I feel like while the lyrics to all of the songs are pretty poetic and metaphorical, they are at the same time much more straightforward in meaning than our previous releases, so I’m hoping fans and listeners will be able to clearly understand (and hopefully relate to, in their own personal ways) each song on there, but I’m sure there’s a lot of lyrics and lines that might be better understood only after having listened to the album more than once. Sonically, because the album includes elements from the pop world, dance music, various electronic music genres, heavier metal genres like deathcore, even some post-metal and prog elements, all fused together into a post-metalcore package, and because the production is much more layered, detailed and intricate than before for us, I feel like this album is filled with a bunch of little ear-candy moments and subtle surprises that fans and listeners will hopefully pick up on, especially after hearing the album more than once and after having listened to it on a good sound system or good headphones. The diehard Hei’An fans that were with us from the start, will also be able to find several imago flashbacks on several songs, even though the full package sounds vastly different now. So yeah, a lot of different little things.

2. What got you into music, and can you tell us about the moment you realized you wanted to be a musician?

For me personally, I remember it really clicked for me when I first discovered Iron Maiden back in 2nd grade of elementary school. I only casually listened to music before (I was also like 7 at the time haha), but I remember that a lot of my classmates back then had a bit of an AC/DC craze going on, and while I liked it as well, I didn’t get quite as obsessed with that particular band in the same way a lot of my classmates did. But I did want to fit in and be as cool as them and started listening to AC/DC on YouTube, and I vividly remember the moment when YouTube organically and randomly suggested Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” to me, I clicked on it, listened to it, and my mind was absolutely blown. I remember at that moment I was like ‘alright, I wanna be like these guys when I grow up’ and I quickly enrolled in music school where I studied classical guitar, and practiced electric guitar on my own simultaneously. My music taste evolved so much over time, though (although I don’t listen to them nearly as religiously as I used to as a kid, Iron Maiden will always have a very special place in my heart!), and I ended up exploring so many different subgenres of metal, from technical death metal to black metal to power metal to folk metal to metalcore and everything in-between, and as the years went by, I also started listening to a bunch of pop, a bunch of different electronic music genres (from darkwave to drum&bass to future house to dubstep and everything in-between), also some hiphop, rap, trap, jazz, classical, a bunch of everything.. I only started singing in high school when I frequented the Conservatory of Music in Ljubljana, where I studied classical guitar and was taking classical singing lessons as well for a bit, and after that, I studied music production at United Pop. So it’s been quite a journey so far, both as a music listener / enjoyer, and as an aspiring professional musician, but it all truly began in that one little moment, when I was just 7 years old and randomly discovered Iron Maiden during those early days of YouTube. It was kind of the moment that set the whole domino effect in motion that led me, and us as a band, to where we are today, and wherever we’ll end up being in the future, so I guess that’s why I remember that little moment so vividly, like it was yesterday.

3. Building on that, is there a specific song, album, performer, or live show that guided your musical taste?

I mean, Iron Maiden were my very first band I obsessed over, but as I said, that was when I was 7 years old and probably up to the age of like 10-11. I then started exploring various different kinds of music, both from the metal world and outside, and there were quite a few epiphany moments when I first discovered a particular artist, a particular genre, a particular style, that then led to me exploring different stuff and shaping my trajectory both as a music listener and as a musician. I remember the first time I heard Sempiternal by Bring Me The Horizon, which is still my favorite album of theirs, that album really blew my mind and helped shape my taste in music A LOT for sure. I remember I had a similar kind of epiphany when I first discovered Skrillex, or when I first discovered Humanity’s Last Breath, or Jon Hopkins, or Carpenter Brut, or Alcest, there were sooo many WILDLY different artists that caused a moment like that to happen for me throughout the years.. More recently, I had variations of that kind of moment with Blackpink, Aloboi, Bad Omens, Sleep Token, Catch Your Breath, NF, a looooooot of veeeeery different artists. When it comes to live shows, there’s also so many that come to mind.. Seeing Alcest live, Leprous live, Architects live, Imagine Dragons live, Jon Hopkins live, Behemoth live, A Day To Remember live.. I have very vivid memories of these (and many more) shows where something clicked in me and I thought to myself ‘ok, this and this artist is doing this and this live SO well, I need to try and be better as well’ etc. So it’s kind of impossible for me to pick just one single moment like this, or one single song / album / performer / live shows, as there truly were soooooo many that really hit me. I do go and see a lot of shows from vastly different artists in a year (well, at least as many as I can afford, so still way fewer than I’d ideally want to see, but still), so there have been quite a few pivotal moments through the years.

4. If you could call in any one collaborator to do a song with, who would it be, and why?

Uuu, that’s a REALLY tough one for me. I listen to so much stuff and am inspired by so many wildly different artists and producers, and I also have periods in life where I listen to more of this, or more of that, so my taste can evolve quite drastically over time. So I’m sure that if I was asked this question a week ago, or a week from now, the answer might already be different than today, let alone if I was asked this same question in like a year, or five years. But right now, the first collaborator that came to mind is an artist, and that artist is INJI. She’s a fantastic electronic dance music producer and vocalist, I don’t know her personally or have any kind of ties to her at all at this point, and she’s getting pretty damn huge lately so she might be a bit out of reach for a band at our level right now (but this IS more of a “what if” question, so I get to dream a bit, right?) – although you never know what might happen in the future – but these past few days, I’ve been listening to a loooot of her stuff. I must say that I personally don’t connect with most of her lyrics or her lyrics writing style in general (but that’s absolutely fine, I am NOT shitting on her AT ALL – every artist has their own writing style, not everything will click with everybody, and that’s the beauty of it!), but the way she writes and produces her instrumentals in particular is just soooo fresh, unique (yet familiar, but still unmistakably INJI), and it just scratches the right itch for me right now. I’d honestly LOVE to do a Hei’An song with her at some point. But yeah, there are so many others I could list, and again, my answer to this question will always be depending on the day – some artists that I’ve listed before as people I’d love to collaborate on a song with at some point are Skrillex, Jennie (Blackpink), Oli Sykes (Bring Me The Horizon), Vessel (Sleep Token), Post Malone, Nothing But Thieves, Gesaffelstein, and the list goes on and on and on and on and on… Now, all of the artists I’ve listed here are people that are sadly still WAY out of reach for us because we are still way too small, and I’m very well aware of the fact that we might never reach SUCH a level so that calling any of these people would be possible.. But you never know what happens in life, we’ll for sure keep grinding and working our assess off when it comes to this whole music industry thing, and while we like to keep our short-term goals realistic and attainable, we do dare to dream when it comes to long-term goals, so again, you never know! 🙂

5. What is your favorite activity when out of the studio and/or not on tour? What do you like to do to unwind?

Well, music has kind of consumed most of my life by now, so even when I don’t work on music-related activities, I still listen to a bunch of music, watch live show videos, go to shows if I can, write little ideas down etc.. But outside of anything like that, I really love cooking to unwind – I’m a big foodie in general, and I honestly often find cooking the food even more fun than actually eating it, so that’d be one for sure. I would NEVER work in a pro kitchen, but cooking at home as a bit of a hobby has proven to be a really fun (and still productive!) activity for me. I also love reading, watching movies and TV shows. I especially love the horror genre in all of these things, I’m a huge Stephen King fan for instance. I also love astronomy and astrophysics, as that was also at one point a possible career choice for me (before I decided that I’d go on and continue studying and pursuing music, which was always an even earlier and generally more prevalent life-long dream), but I do still love to read about new findings in those fields, and I highly doubt I’ll ever completely leave that field behind, although I am extremely satisfied with my choice of keeping it as just a little hobby and rather pursuing music as a career instead. So yeah, a bunch of little things like that here and there, but I’d say music still does end up consuming 90% of my time anyway, and I don’t mind it at all.

6. How would you describe your music to someone who’d never listened to you before? What is the one comparison a reviewer or fan has made that made you cringe or you disagreed with?

I’d say our music is dark and deeply emotional, yet hopeful, and sonically very cinematic, very melodic, mainly metalcore-oriented right now, but still rich enough with the blend of styles we have going on so that it can appeal to somebody listening to pop and electronic music, or somebody listening to heavier metal genres as well. I’d love to some day bring Hei’An to such a level of uniqueness so that it becomes almost like its own genre. I really hope we can grow as artists enough to some day be able to reach that kind of level and fulfill that wish, that’d be SO amazing! In terms of cringy comparisons. There’s one that came to mind right away haha – during our imago cycle, especially at shows, we’ve heard more than once from a few people from the audience that we reminded them of Dream Theater. Now, NO shade towards Dream Theater, I must be honest and say that I’ve never quite listened to that band A LOT a lot, but I did thoroughly enjoy their album Systematic Chaos, and have nothing but immense respect for that band and all of the members as individual musicians as well, those guys are geniuses for sure, even if they’re not 100% something I’d personally fully vibe with, you know? But that’s good, that’s the beauty of music, that there’s sooooooo much different stuff to listen to, and you can find so much cool stuff in so many vastly different releases, and some will just hit you more than others, and that is rarely ever a reflection of the artists’ ability or talent, it’s usually just a matter of what clicks with you at a specific given time. Anyway, Dream Theater, as much as I respect them, were never really a direct influence on Hei’An, and there’s honestly just one little part in one single song on imago where I agree that ‘alright, if you WANT to hear a DT influence here, I guess I get it, although they were NOT a direct influence for it while writing,’ and that’s it. But we’ve had like 4-5 very separate instances of people comparing us to Dream Theater at the time, and as flattering as that was due to the sheer technical talent of that band and how huge of a band they are, it just made absolutely 0 sense to me and I remember thinking at one point ‘are people.. completely misunderstanding our music?’ it was really funny and a bit weird to us at the time. But I’m happy that now with the new album, we’ve gotten WAY more comparisons to bands like Bring Me The Horizon, Sleep Token, Bad Omens, The Plot in You etc., and more people seem to be picking up on the non-metal influences as well, so I’m glad that the comparisons we’re hearing now are making much more sense to us haha 😉

7. When your band is hanging out together, who cooks, who gets the drinks in, and who is first to crack out the acoustic guitars for a singalong?

Well, if it’s the kind of hang where there’s cooking involved, it’ll usually be me or Aljaž cooking, in terms of drinks we usually ALL end up taking care of them and getting way too much alcohol (but still drinking it all). And we actually don’t really do acoustic guitar singalongs, but we do usually listen to a lot of music when we hang out, either in a really focused way, or as sort of background music if we’re just talking and focusing on that, or if we’re playing any party games / drinking games etc. Lately, we’ve loved a music related little game where you need to name an artist, preferably try to pick somebody you know for a fact the other boys will proooobably not be familiar with, but instead of picking the exact song to show the other boys, you are obligated to go with the first suggestion that any given platform (we usually go with Spotify or YouTube) first suggests, so it’s not always the exact song you might have wanted it to be. It’s not much of a game on its own, but it’s a really fun way to discover new music together while hanging out and having fun, without it being any kind of chore at all. Lately, we’ve also loved playing charades while drinking together, as the game gets progressively more and more bizarre and more and more fun then more we end up drinking – have you ever had to show the phrase Defenestrations of Prague during a game of charades with NO talking / sounds or showing separate letters etc.? Well, I’ve had, and after a few glasses of whiskey, it becomes much easier than it might sound haha 😉

8. When was the last time you were starstruck and who was it?

I haven’t been starstruck a loooot of times in my life, but there definitely were quite a few occasions nevertheless. The last one was probably at NAMM in Anaheim, CA in January of this year where we were hanging out with Eric Emery (who’s worked with Blink-182, Yungblud and numerous other huge names before) and it was pretty surreal to me to actually be able to hang out privately with a guy as accomplished as he is. In terms of celebrity artists, we met quite a few absolutely huge artists and different celebrities at NAMM, like Stevie Wonder, Tosin Abasi, Rick Beato, and many others. So yeah, NAMM seems to be a good place to go if you want to be starstruck a bit!

9. What is the best part of being a musician? If you could no longer be a musician for whatever reason, what would be your dream job?

The best part is being able to express myself and work through my own things while simultaneously creating something that other people end up enjoying or even find helpful to process their own sh*t. One super cool thing is also that it’s so diverse and vibrant, and although it’s substantially more tedious, strenuous, stressful and just plain HARD than some people outside of the music industry might imagine, the fact that you get to have so much variety and eventfulness in what you do is truly a blessing. And since musician IS, and truly always has been my dream job, it’s hard to think of anything else, honestly. I guess, if I had chosen differently when I was deciding what to go and study, I might have very well been an astronomer / astrophysicist now, so we could go with that. Programming / coding also sounds like a lot of fun, and I’ve actually done a few online courses before (basic Python, basic Javascript and things like that), so I could hypothetically imagine myself in that field as well. But musician is still the undisputable number 1 choice for a dream job here, I don’t really want to ever (have to) pursue anything else, and I hope I can manage to do that!

10. What is one question you have always wanted an interviewer to ask – and what is the answer? Conversely, what question are you tired of answering?

Oh, I don’t really know. I always love it when interviewers surprise me with a question, and when I need to step back and think for a minute, and only then start answering – questions like that are always the most fun, and usually the deepest! So I can’t really give you an answer to this one, as my main point is being SURPRISED by the question, so I can’t / don’t know it already! 😉 The question I’m most tired of answering. There are a few. I’ve been asked what the name Hei’An means soooo many times, that I always roll my eyes a bit when I’m presented with this question YET AGAIN. Like, I get it, we are still way too small for everybody to know this already, but dude, they can just go and read ANOTHER one of the many many many interviews where this question was asked before. Now, when I do get asked this question, I still answer it politely and don’t hold it against the interviewer at all, truly! But yeah, if I could avoid being asked this question for at least a few years, that’d be sick!

11. Looking back over your career, is there a single moment or situation you feel was a misstep or you would like to have a “do over,” even if it didn’t change your current situation?

There are several little moments here and there for sure. But we all view stuff like that as opportunities to learn and grow, and we really love to try and learn from our mistakes and try to improve, instead of endlessly pondering over past things when we could be focusing on the present, and subsequently, the future. That being said, I’d love it if we dove into a more produced sound with our first album already, instead of only first doing it with this new one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly proud of that first album for what it is, the songs themselves still mean SO much to me, and it was the best we could do at that time. I just can’t help but think that if we had focused on a few different things back then already, our career might have been even bigger by now. But as I said, we always try to learn from the past, improve as artists, as musicians and as a band, and keep living in the present while building our future. So all good, aside from a few minor things here and there, no huge regrets so far, just learning experiences, if anything, which is 100% normal and natural for every single band / artist out there.

12. If you could magically go back in time and be a part of the recording sessions for any one record in history, which would you choose – and what does that record mean to you?

Oh, dude. Not sure. SO many great albums have been released throughout history up to this point. So this question might be another one of those where my answer will probably be different any time I’m asked it, depending on the era I’m personally in as an individual. But right now, one album did instantly come to mind, and I actually mentioned it before briefly.. It’s Sempiternal by Bring Me The Horizon. It’s an album that sort of redefined the whole metalcore genre, pushed BMTH outside of just that genre and led the way to them greatly expanding their genre horizons (hehe), and had an immense impact on me as a music listener and as a musician, as the raw emission and sensibility, paired with the heaviness of it, combined with production elements that are generally more reminiscent of maybe indie pop than metalcore, I remember that being the first time when I was like ‘alright, so pop and metal do go together, huh?’ Of course, BMTH ended up being WAY poppier later than they were back then (and I LOVE them for it), but that was sort of a turning point for me, and it definitely influenced me A LOT. It’s also such a devastating album, and as a teen, I was so obsessed with it and the raw emotion it conveys.. I still get goosebumps whenever I listen to it. Timeless album. If I could go back in time and actually be part of that album. Now that’d be something, wouldn’t it 😉

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Category: Interviews