When I started Psychopomp, I wanted to create something special. Not only an indie press, but something a little feral, something unique that would capture all of my wild ideas. I started with a press, but it was never going to be where things ended.
Music has been something I’ve been passionate about since I was very young. And from well before the launch of Psychopomp the small press, and Psychopomp the cool, gothy blog, I always knew that I’d create Psychopomp the music publisher.
Today I’m excited to announce the realization of that idea, that we’ve signed our first band on at Psychopomp.
Hail Your Highness is a Michigan-based dream rock duo making an original soundtrack (OST) to Aimee Ogden’s upcoming Psychopomp novella Starstruck.
I talked to Hail Your Highness and author Aimee Ogden about the project:
Introducing Hail Your Highness
Describe your sound for people who have never heard your songs before. What’s a good introduction to Hail Your Highness?
We think of Hail Your Highness as bigger than its individual parts, a project with no easy genre. We started out in the hardcore/screamo scene of Michigan back in the mid 2000s where bands like Chiodos and Still Remains were representing the scene, and growing up with that influence is always something HYH has tapped into, and is still built into our foundation.
Our sound is further influenced by a love of indie pop and a deep passion for K-Pop. We like to think of our sound as constantly evolving, a sentient concept of sound grounded the the music-sphere of a dream-like state. Listen to how songs like “Imagine the Cure,” “Dandelion,” and “Duality” swing from dream pop to grunge to rock-driven trap
What drew you to this project?
The combination of books and music are two of our top tier passions. To be able to combine them into a project creating an OST for the first time felt like a fresh opportunity to do something new that we were ready to step into. After reading Starstruck, the visual and musical storyline instantly came together and developed into a tangible, layered sound that pushed us outside our box and normal musical structures. We’re always looking for unique projects to take on outside of our standard “music industry flow” of release a single, promote it, tour it, onto the next. This project leneded us a hand up in a state of ruminating and figuring out what our next move as a band would be.
What can we expect from this OST
We dove into our back-catalog of music after reading the story, of songs that have been piling up since pre-Covid and instantly knew several that would work perfect for this story. Being such a soft, almost Ghibli-like adventure fantasy featuring vivid anthropomorphic characters, we were able to take a fresh approach on how we structure songs and tap into multiple genres that we’ve specialized in over the years.
Each song not only showcases a different style of music we love playing, but we also took an approach of giving each character their own theme. As soon as we read about Prish, Alsing, Otra, and Wick we were able to instantly romanticize the beautiful writing and character descriptions that Aimee provided us with as readers.
As musicians, we took to the path of creating a cinematic score, in a way, where we have songs for intros, opening credits, character themes, and ending credits. That helped us create this epic sort of vibe to this adventure of finding companionship in the most unlikely of characters. It’s such a visually written story, it was so easy for us to see the world and feel the emotions of these 4 core characters that Aimee has created.
What’s the best way for people to follow Hail Your Highness and support the band?
Our most active social media platform is Instagram and we’ve been leaning more into testing out Blue Sky and Threads as well even though you can follow us on literally everything. But the best way to support and stay in contact with us is on our Patreon. We’ve been able to create this beautiful little safe community over the past 8 years where we share everything from demos, new music first, livestreams, and group chats, to handwritten monthly postcards, exclusive merch and even one-on-one mentoring sessions in songwriting from us. It’s free to join with access to exclusive blogs and photo galleries and many different subscription based tiers starting at just $5 for even more content you can’t find anywhere else. We always answer comments and DM’s and just have such a nice time being humans and talking about life while showing people everything that goes on behind the scenes to make what we do as an independent DIY band a reality.
Buying music is huge source of support these days in the digital streaming age, so Bandcamp is a great place to buy our physical media from CD’s, to cassettes that we put out on our own label, to our first vinyl that we were able to team up with our longtime friends at Rotten Princess Records to make happen just last year. You can find many exclusive releases on our Bandcamp as well, along with lots of other merch like shirts, stickers, and anything else we can dream up in the moment.
You can find all the links to support our band here: http://linktr.ee/hyhband
Bio:
On paper alone, Hail Your Highness sound poetic: two sisters from Michigan, who play dreamy emotional music that swirls together aspects of genres ranging from hard rock to shoegaze to trap. But it’s their music, with its unorthodox song structures, dreamy dual vocals, and lava-flow undercurrent of distortion and aggression, that completes the picture. Hail Your Highness (HYH) was officially founded by sisters Jessie and Niki Bobenmoyer back in 2008 as a 4 piece band, but their true awakening to full potential started in 2016 when they dove in head first as a 2 piece dream rock duo. It was a formative year teaming up with sound engineer Brian “Bone” Thorburn of Threshold Studio Productions and Justin Wheeler at Clean Cut Entertainment that helped support the duo that evolved into the underground powerhouse team that is the HYH we know today.
Three Questions With Aimee Ogden
What’s the genesis of this story?
Before it was a novella, this story was a young adult novel told from Wick’s perspective; before that, the origin point was the Beauty Heart Radishes I used to buy at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. I loved the vibrant color hiding on the inside, beneath the dull yellow-green exterior, and when I imagined a world where living things could become ensouled by a falling star, I knew that one of those people would be exactly that kind of radish. The story crystallized around the ending first, before I knew anything else that happened: an accident, a terrible choice.
What are your thoughts on having a band create a soundtrack to something you wrote?
My first reaction is “oh no, I’m not cool enough for this!” Fortunately, my second reaction is to be relieved, because Hail Your Highness will take excellent care of all the parts that require being cool. This is something I would never have dreamed of putting on my writing bingo card, but I’m thrilled that I get to be part of something so special!
Do you listen to music while you write?
I almost always listen to music while I’m working (and I think I’ve accidentally trained myself to reach for a keyboard when I hear certain songs). Mostly when I’m writing, I prefer instrumental music; when there are lyrics in a language I speak, my verbal input and output start to get tangled up. But I get a lot of mileage out of the soundtrack from the first campaign of The Adventure Zone, Holst’s Planets, and swing/jazz from the 1930’s and 40’s–my favorites are Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington. I also put together playlists for longer projects, which I like to listen to while I’m taking a walk or cooking or doing something less word-intensive, like outlining. Those end up being a pretty eclectic mix: CAKE, Norma Tanega, Katzenjammer, OK Go, The Amazing Devil, Brittany Howard, Slimane, and The Hard Lessons are a few that figure heavily in the current rotation.
Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella, “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” was a Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has never met a watermelon radish she didn’t like (although the watermelon radishes might not have been wild about her).
Starstruck
Sometimes a star falls and collides with a living thing that brings it into sapient consciousness. Prish, a radish, is one such being. Her wife, a fox named Alsing is another. Together they live in a cabin and greet newly starstruck people as they come to life. But it’s been some time since the last star fell, and there have been no more starstruck to welcome into being. Prish and Aisling decide to leave the forest for the city and meet some interesting characters on their travels; a starstruck rock (which they thought impossible!), and an abandoned young boy whose parents were scientists trying to harvest the magic of the starstruck for themselves.
Come along on a journey through a strange place, with a found family you’ll want to make your own.
Starstruck, a novella by Aimee Ogden will be published by Psychopomp on June 17th, 2025
Starstruck OST by Hail Your Highness will be available from Psychopomp on June 13, 2025
Sign up to our newsletter for updates about Starstruck, we’ll soon be sharing the cover and the entire first chapter:
