Despite the recent label “Brooklyn’s enigmatic musical mainstay” coming from no less an authority than Ms. Gutes Guterman herself, the singer Heaven Schmitt actually lives a few train stops over in Ridgewood, within the periphery of, say, Rolo’s. Schmitt moved to the neighborhood on the recommendation of siblings Angel and Lulu Prost, who’ve accomplished modest local renown already as the indie band Frost Children. The Prosts themselves had landed thereabouts, some years earlier, after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. “They live right up the street from me. When I moved here, they were the only people I knew in Ridgewood. And now it’s the place to be,” Schmitt says, when I catch them before the band headlines a three act set in the back of Windjammer, a popular local dive.

Sporting long Billie Eilish-green highlights and switching between a Dark Souls baseball cap and a top hat that wouldn’t be out of place on a Mad Hatter, Schmitt immediately gives Axl Rose or Linda Perry or anyone else coming out of that whole introspective self-styled glam-grunge thing. Their band is Grumpy, an enterprising group Schmitt also brought to the neighborhood, with the notable exception of a guitarist who, instead, found a sick pad in nearby Bed-Stuy. The group had, largely, formed in Nashville in the waning pre-shutdown days of 2019 and its spotify bio reads: “The keyboardist and bassist are Heaven’s ex girlfriends, the drummer is their ex-husband (the guitar player and Heaven never dated but when they first moved to New York Heaven had a crush on Diego and there was one night when they thought they might kiss but they didn’t).” 

Schmitt connects the group to the “dirtybag twee” scene, a label they say was created by local heads as a response to “indie sleaze.” It wasn’t that serious, Schmitt insists. It had already been chronicled, somewhat extensively, by a writer in Nylon who traced its origin to “a hyperlocal Instagram meme page” in the neighborhood that had posted: “Welcome to ‘Honore Square Garden,’ the Bushwick microneighborhood that is home to Brooklyn’s emerging ‘Dirtybag Twee’ scene.” It had been liked by some 42 people. The story about it in Nylon had quoted Schmitt extensively on the subject. “Grungy, say anything because everything is allowed,” Schmitt tells the magazine. 

Both Schmitt and Nylon say the figurehead of the scene is one Christian Medrano, a tall and slightly bearded man in his early 30s who operates Precious Human, a local seven-piece folk punk band. I catch this group opening for Grumpy, where they come out in full, humble form, led by Medrano himself, wearing khaki pants, a brown sweatshirt and graciously encouraging everyone to sing along to his earnest songs about the late Marxist pop-academic Mark Fisher and breaking up at the Myrtle Broadway station.

Medrano and Schmitt have written songs together themselves, like the recently-released “Lonesome Ride,” a sort of singalong scene posse cut that also features Sidney Gish, a singer-songwriter who once opened for Mitski as a college student, before also eventually landing in Ridgewood. The song the group made together feels ramshackle and handmade, as if each backing harmony was held together by tape. The music video was filmed down the street, in a Chinese restaurant next door to Cassettes, a small indie club that used to be known as Sundown. When the group perform it together, they do it in front of a projected screen, like they’re doing their time at one of Cassettes’ weekend downstairs karaoke nights.

The music that Grumpy makes is a similarly precocious kind of bedroom pop, as deliberate and stylized as Schmitt themself. There’s “Saltlick,” the single that opens last year’s Wolfed, which can feel like a shot directly at making the kind of electro-mashup bad skin regime hyperpop records 100gecs has been slowly circulating in the mainstream. The group quickly ditch this, however, for a song like “Beach Towel,” which comes off like a haunted and earnest Xiu Xiu impression or “Protein,” which reads like something Liz Phair would record in her room in 1993, an achingly intimate sketch of going nowhere. All of this is anchored by Schmitt’s voice, so bubbly in conversation and so soft and studied on stage, the result perhaps of training at Belmont University, the Christian songwriting factory that generated the Florida Georgia Line and at least three American Idol finalists. 

“After I graduated, I was like: I didn’t blow up and make it and now I’m too old to be trying this. So I graduated college and then dramatically quit music. I guess I just didn’t have what it takes,” says Schmitt. 

Eventually, Schmitt drifted back to music, first with a band called “Guest Host” (“It’s so bad on so many levels”) and then with Grumpy, which would quickly sign to a small label founded by Schmitt’s college friends, Acrophase Records, that would go on to find some later success signing the Huntington Beach “aggressive elevator soul” singer Cameron Lew. One of Acrophase’s earliest releases was Grumpy’s debut, Loser, which Schmitt tells me they intended as a mission statement. A vaguely emo and vaguely acoustic ten song set, Schmitt would, in subsequent years, distance themself from it, telling Stereogum they “weren’t in love with” the album and had “passed off too many decisions” in making it.  

“At the time, I think I just thought I was a grumpy loser,” Schmitt told me. “I was feeling kind of lost.”

Schmitt had, by then, already written a second album but had  ”scrapped it.” Their marriage with Austin Arnold, the band’s drummer, was “unraveling.” The band “amicably and understandably parted ways” with the Acrophase, Schmitt says, and then split Nashville for Chicago. There, in the basement of an apartment in Wicker Park, about a week after finalizing Schmitt’s divorce with Arnold, the band recorded some “deeply personal songs about how we felt about each other.” These would appear on Wolfed. 

The group took the music to Ridgewood, where Schmitt found a sympathetic ear at an indie label run by Beach Fossils singer Dustin Payseur, who also drifted into the neighborhood in recent years and announced Grumpy as its latest signing last year. A second EP is reportedly planned, releasing further songs recorded in Chicago. “It’s certainly the ‘Part II’ of that,” Schmitt tells me. “These are summer songs.” 

Things are looking up for Schmitt, who tells me that despite their band’s name “I’m a very happy, sweet person.” At the show, they’re selling black band shirts that read, in blocky font: “Grumpy Is My Lease Favorite Band.” The band picked up another ex-girlfriend when Schmitt spotted Anya Good on a friend’s phone. “I was like: stop, she will be my girlfriend,” says Schmitt. Good soon moved to the neighborhood too, though the romantic relationship didn’t pan out. “It was amazing and epic but we ended up not being right as partners, but surely as partners in life and art,” says Schmitt, who instead enlisted Good as both a bassist and the band’s creative director, handling the band’s spiky album covers. At one point, Schmitt jokes that “dating me is like agreeing to a life sentence to being in my band.”

Before their set, I spot Schmitt writing out the band’s setlist on a notepad; they write out “New Song” in thick sharpie marker. Most of the songs their band is playing are new. One of them is a mordaunt, piano-twinkling semi-Alanis Morisette record called “Queens” that has yet to be released. It warbles earnestly through the quiet room, conjuring with it the feeling of wistfully riding one of the nearby aboveground M trains. It’s good stuff. Schmitt thinks so too.   

“We think we’re going to be big. Our name in lights, just you wait,” they say. 

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.