Passionate, liberating, and burning with defiant fire, Selve’s ‘Breaking Outta Heaven’ EP races beyond the gates of their history-making Abbey Road album ‘Breaking Into Heaven,’ opening paradise into a maze of desire, danger, and rude awakenings. Across five seductive, genre-blurring songs, the Gold Coast six-piece break heaven open from the inside, chasing freedom past the myth of arrival and proving paradise was never the ending – only the next door to kick open.
Stream: “Run Boy Run” – Selve
We’ve broken in, flung the gates open, and everyone is welcome in this space that was formerly only for the few.
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Heaven, in Selve’s hands, has never sounded like a place of surrender.
In fact, it sounds like a locked gate rattling off its hinges; a dancefloor glowing at the end of a long spiritual chase; a band barreling through rock mythology with bolt cutters, sacred fire, and enough love to burn the whole illusion down. On Breaking Outta Heaven, the Gold Coast six-piece return to the world they cracked open on last year’s history-making Breaking Into Heaven, only to ask a wilder question: What happens after you get inside? What if the dream you fought to enter was another maze, another stage, another glittering trap dressed up as salvation?
Hello again it’s nice to meet you
For the hundredth
thousandth time, tonight
Well, welcome back again
Sit down in that chair
You don’t remember
but we left everything off here
Imagine if you can
we fell in love again
And burnt so hot, we broke
the second we were caught in
So come on, hop on in my car
We’re trippin’ through a trillion stars
I’m only tryna kill your god and
Taste your sacred apple heart
So come on baby, hop the fence
Bolt-cutter everything you’ve read
I’m only tryna resurrect a romance
That was heaven sent
Heaven’s open for the night
Heaven’s open and true love is alive
– “Heaven’s Open,” Selve
Released June 19th via Community Music, Breaking Outta Heaven is the companion EP to Selve’s acclaimed 2025 sophomore album Breaking Into Heaven, the first full-length album by an Aboriginal artist ever recorded at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios. Led by proud Jabirr Jabirr man Loki Liddle, alongside Anaiwan lead guitarist Reece Bowden, vocalist Creation Saffigna, drummer Michael Baldi, bassist/producer Scott French, and keyboardist Liam Kirk, Selve – named one of Atwood‘s 2025 artists to watch – have spent the better part of the past decade building their world through spectacle with purpose: High-theatre alt-rock, rave-lit psych-pop, First Nations storytelling, and a central pulse of rebellion, all held together by love.
That history matters here, but Breaking Outta Heaven doesn’t arrive as a victory lap; rather, it feels more like a secret door opening behind the throne. Where Breaking Into Heaven was rooted in reclamation – in entering spaces that had long been guarded, mythologized, or denied – these five songs loosen the walls around that triumph and let newer, stranger forces rush in. The EP is warmer in places, sexier in others, and often more spacious, but its invitation comes with teeth: Heaven may be open, desire may be holy, love may be alive, and still, there is a creature in the dark. There is a boy running for his life. There is an awakening waiting at the end of the dream.
Recorded between Midnight Special Records in the French countryside and Abbey Road’s Studio 3, with the closing track carrying live orchestral recordings from Selve’s sold-out Breaking Into Heaven album preview spectacular at HOTA featuring the Australian Session Orchestra, Breaking Outta Heaven stretches the band’s mythology without softening its charge. It begins by throwing the gates open and ends with Loki Liddle standing inside the wreckage of a dream, ready for whatever tragedy, deity, or revelation comes next. In between, Selve transform liberation into movement: A feverish, bodily, undeniably bold and buoyant act of escape.
It’s this tension and uncertainty that give Breaking Outta Heaven its charge. Across five songs, Selve move like a band testing every wall of the paradise they’ve entered: Dreamy funk and nu-disco shimmer, nocturnal synth-rock seduction, riff-heavy release, runaway art-pop adrenaline, and a cinematic finale that lifts the whole saga into the stratosphere. At fifteen minutes, the EP is short, but it doesn’t feel small. Each track opens a different door inside the same musical palace, revealing another way love, desire, fear, and freedom can collide once the gates are no longer locked.
From its first open-hearted welcome to its final sky-cracking surge, Breaking Outta Heaven moves with purpose: Tempting, burning, sprinting, and refusing to let heaven stay sealed.
Opener “Heaven’s Open” is the invitation: Dreamy, sun-kissed, and smile-inducing, its funk-lit groove calling to mind Parcels’ golden-hour glide while Selve add their own cosmic mischief. “Heaven’s open and true love is alive,” Liddle sings, framing paradise less as a destination than a space forcibly made communal. The song’s warmth is crucial: After an album about breaking into spaces guarded by power and myth – one that began with the lyrics, “Breaking into heaven is your birthright,” “Heaven’s Open” feels like the doors swinging wide for everyone who was told to wait outside.
“Creature of the Night” slips into a darker room. One of the EP’s undeniable highlights, it creeps forward with Depeche Mode-esque shadow and sensuality, turning fever, sweat, moonlight, and fear into a seductive pulse. The lyric “It terrifies me but I’ll answer when you call” catches the song’s central thrill: This creature may be danger, desire, temptation, or some buried self finally crawling up the wall. Selve allow this tension to breathe, and the result is hypnotic – a slow-burn haunt that gets under the skin.
At night a fever grips me
Visions hold me down
The sweat is dripping off me
Mind is running round
My heart is breaking as it
Opens like a flower
The moon is burning through my
Window by the hour
I see your shadow crawling
Slowly up the wall
It terrifies me but I’ll
Answer when you call
Move with me
Creature of the Night…
1, 2, 3, Creature of the Night…
“Desire” brings the fire back to the surface. Built on roaring guitars, glistening keys, and eruptive vocals, the track treats want as volatile life force: Dramatic, messy, dangerous, and impossible to fully tame. Its repeated cries of “Heartbeat, wild, desire!” strip the feeling down to the body itself, while images of forbidden lovers, holy fire, and stolen power make the song feel like a chase scene through the sacred and profane. It’s pure riff-rock fun with a fever in its bones.
Forbidden healer
Hollywood can see ya
Holy fire dealer
Pleased to finally meet ya
Forbidden lover
You know that I want ya
They all wanna steal that
Holy fire from ya
Heartbeat, wild, desire
“Run Boy Run” pushes the EP into full flight. Exhilarating and restless, it rides a spirited, pulsating rush of energy, with Selve channeling forward motion into both escape and pursuit. The lyric “You said it’s made of matter, I said it’s made of love” lands as one of the project’s clearest declarations, a refusal to let the world be reduced to mechanics, status, or spectacle. Around it, the song’s haunted imagery – Romeo bleeding beneath Mona Lisa’s smile, a messiah housing complex, a train that may or may not arrive – turns ambition into a surreal chase through fame, faith, and self-mythology.
“[It’s] the idea that we all might die waiting for our train to come – another reminder that our desire can be our liberation and our cage,” Liddle explains. “And that it takes art to walk that line with grace.”
Now Romeo is bleedin’
down the haunted halls of time
He’s up against the marble
under Mona Lisa’s smile
And he looks so goddamn tragic
and broken as the dawn
That breaks across the ruin
of the heart that beats forlorn
You said it’s made of matter
I said it’s made of love
A thousand hours late
but babe my train is gonna come
You said it’s made of matter
I said it’s made of love
So run boy run
Then “Rude Awakening” arrives like this whole chapter’s grand finale: Cinematic, soul-shaking, and immense, complete with a searing guitar solo and elegant orchestral flourishes that raise the stakes until the entire moment feels larger than life. Liddle sings, “No amount of suffering will ever kill this love in me,” and the line becomes the EP’s final act of defiance. By the time those grand arrangements surge around him, Breaking Outta Heaven has stopped being only about escape. It becomes a threshold – the end of one breathtaking dream, and the first glimpse of whatever Selve are brave enough to build next.
Taken together, Breaking Into Heaven and Breaking Outta Heaven play like two movements of the same glorious provocation.
The former claimed space with force, history, and righteous theatricality; the latter wanders through the aftermath with a looser grin and a sharper sense of danger. Selve aren’t merely expanding a universe here so much as testing the dream they fought so hard to enter, asking what liberation looks like once the gates give way and the myth starts answering back. Across both records, their music turns heaven from a distant promise into a living, unstable place – one built from love, sweat, spectacle, ancestral memory, and the courage to keep moving when arrival reveals another door.
Liddle’s own description of the EP gets right to that restless afterglow. Breaking Outta Heaven is playful by design, but its playfulness carries a philosophical sting: The victory has happened, the room has changed, and still the soul has further to travel.
“We have had a super fun and wild ride since the release of last year’s album Breaking Into Heaven,” he smiles. “Breaking Outta Heaven is a sneaky bonus chapter. It is also a bit sexier, more spacious, a little more open, expansive, and inviting. Perhaps even a little less antagonistic, but still as subversive – if you pay attention. It’s fun, a mix of something both new and familiar. These five songs are all beloved to us, and all tie in directly to the narratives and ideas that were being explored in Breaking Into Heaven – we broke into heaven, now we need to break out. Maybe this grand goal in the sky we are all trying to reach, whether that be spiritual or to do with our big dreams… may indeed just be a big old trap we’ll need to wrestle our way out of in the end…and then what?”
That final question is the spark the EP leaves burning. “And then what?” turns arrival into a challenge.
For Selve, paradise is never a finish line; it’s a place to interrogate, reclaim, dance through, and, when necessary, escape. Their greatest strength across this era is the refusal to let triumph harden into comfort. They keep the story alive by letting it mutate.
Which is why Breaking Outta Heaven feels so special – and vital to the band’s story – even in its brevity. These songs don’t simply extend Breaking Into Heaven; they make the earlier record’s victory feel more complicated, more human, and more alive. Selve entered the myth, lit it from within, and now they’re running beyond its borders with the same impossible fire that got them there in the first place.
Stream Breaking Outta Heaven wherever you listen to music, and dive into Selve’s track-by-track breakdown below as Loki Liddle takes us deeper into the EP’s open gates, shadowed corners, holy fires, runaway dreams, and rude awakenings. Australian fans can catch Selve bringing the Breaking Outta Heaven era to life on their East Coast headline tour and festival run across Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales through September!
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:: stream/purchase Breaking Outta Heaven here ::
:: connect with Selve here ::
Stream: ‘Breaking Outta Heaven’ – Selve
:: Inside Breaking Outta Heaven ::
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Heaven’s Open
“Heaven’s Open” is actually one of the loveliest and warmest songs I think we’ve ever made. It is kind of the flipside of the attitude of ‘Breaking Into Heaven.’ It kinda says, we’ve broken in, flung the gates open, and everyone is welcome in this space that was formerly only for the few. It’s got lovely Jungle-esque synths and rhythms, and I really enjoy the lower warm vocal. Seemed like the perfect way to open the EP.
Creature of the Night
This song is a bit more dark and sexy. Its giving Depeche Mode and really takes its time tempo wise. It kinda creeps under your skin with its infections bass trot and again I really like the character of the vocal performance of this one. And narrative wise…it implies that somewhere in the belly of Heaven is a dark Creature you may need to escape…
Desire
“Desire” is just pure riff rock fun. It’s about embracing the liberating power of Desire. I feel like desire is this thing we all have in us. If you follow it blindly you end up in trouble. If you ignore or suppress it you end up in trouble. So, I think there is a necessary art to figuring out how to straddle desire with love and integrity. Because we’re stuck with it either way. And there is a way to ride the Pegasus into the sun.
Run Boy Run
This is a really unique and different song for us. We’re really proud of it. It feels like it combines a really pumping high intensity verse with a big open and euphoric chorus that we love. Story wise, it is kind of like a cousin song to “Leading Man Lost” off ‘Breaking Into Heaven,’ and leads well into Rude Awakening as the conclusion of the saga
Rude Awakening
“Rude Awakening” was the first song I (Loki) wrote of this entire batch of songs. It carries I think the core message of the whole ‘Breaking Into/Outta Heaven’ universe. We recorded it in Abbey Road and its actually the first song I ever wrote on piano. We have taken actual live recordings from our orchestral premiere of the album and put it into the end of the song which I think really brings it to life and sends it home.
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:: stream/purchase Breaking Outta Heaven here ::
:: connect with Selve here ::
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© Joshua Tate
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