The Pangs of Conscious are the band who, with English singer-songwriter Lovibond May Rowanwood, create original music shaped by melody, harmony, atmosphere and a restless edge—intimate one moment and expansive the next.
Hannah Rose Blyth
Keyboards • Synthesisers • Harmony Vocals
Hannah Rose Blyth is a Bideford-born keyboardist, synthesiser player and harmony vocalist with Lovibond and the Pangs of Conscious.
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An instinctive and attentive musician, Hannah has little interest in filling space simply because it is there. Working with piano, keyboards and synthesisers, she can move from spare atmospheric textures to prominent melodic and rhythmic parts as a song demands. Her playing brings warmth, movement, tension and colour, with a strong sense of how her part fits into the larger arrangement.
Her backing vocals are an equally distinctive part of her contribution. Alongside close harmonies, Hannah often adds answering phrases and playful vocal improvisations, sometimes following the arrangement closely and sometimes taking an unexpected turn when the moment invites it. She has the confidence to follow an instinct and the musical judgement to know when to pull back.
That balance of sensitivity and nerve is characteristic of Hannah herself. Affectionate, observant and quick-witted, she has a dry West Country humour and very little fear of looking ridiculous if doing so will make someone she cares about laugh. Her mischief is warm rather than cruel, and beneath it is a surprisingly precise and determined musician.
Within the Pangs, Hannah brings spontaneity, colour and an element of unpredictability. She knows when a song needs air and when it needs a shove—and is quite willing to provide either.
Heidi Köhler
Drums • Auxiliary Percussion
Heidi Köhler is a Schmalkalden-born, Bideford-raised drummer and percussionist with Lovibond and the Pangs of Conscious.
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Heidi Köhler was born in Schmalkalden, Thuringia, and moved with her family to Bideford when she was nine. Her English was limited at first, and school could be unforgiving while she learned it. During that period her father—an engineer who had played drums in a local rock band when he was younger—gave her a drum kit and taught her the beginnings. What started as somewhere to put frustration soon became something much more permanent.
Lovibond knew Heidi from school and lived only a short way down the street. Before long she was bringing a guitar to the Köhler house and the two were playing together. Heidi’s parents, already accustomed to the drums, apparently decided that a little guitar could do no further harm. Those sessions became the beginning of a musical relationship that predates the Pangs themselves: Heidi never really joined the band. She was already its backbeat.
Behind the kit, Heidi is a physical, patient and instinctive player. She knows when a song needs space and when it needs momentum, when to hold a rhythm firmly in place and when to let it gather weight beneath the rest of the arrangement. Drums remain at the centre of her playing, with auxiliary percussion widening the palette when the music calls for it, and she adds occasional warm low-to-middle harmonies. Lovibond’s description of Heidi as the one who “holds our weather in time” has stuck for good reason.
Offstage she is grounded, practical and remarkably difficult to make bitter, with a dry streak of humour that occasionally catches people half a beat late. She is bilingual, speaks with the North Devon accent she grew into, and still carries Germany with her without feeling obliged to fit perfectly into either box. Running gives her another kind of rhythm and another way of finding some space. Then there is Limey the Third, her three-year-old Alsatian and successor to Limeys One and Two—and Heidi’s occasional observation that, historically speaking, there are two Alsatians in the household.
Freja Lindström
Bass Guitar • Low Harmony Vocals
Freja Lindström is a Gothenburg-born Swedish bassist and contralto harmony vocalist with Lovibond and the Pangs of Conscious.
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Born and raised in Gothenburg, Sweden, Freja Birgitta Lindström is the bassist and principal low-harmony singer in the Pangs of Conscious. Composed, observant and sparing with words, she has a way of listening before speaking—and a dry sense of humour that can leave a joke sitting unnoticed.
Freja was classically trained on double bass before making electric bass her principal instrument. The training shows less as a particular style than as musical judgement: a strong sense of dynamics, intonation, harmony and ensemble balance, and an ear for how much—or how little—a song needs. She does not bring a predetermined bass style to the Pangs. Her playing can be spare or prominent, melodic or forceful, depending upon the arrangement in front of her.
Her natural contralto gives the band its lowest vocal colour, while her bass can provide anything from rhythmic movement to considerable emotional weight. The others sometimes call her “the Pang of Depth”—an affectionate bit of wordplay that stuck because it happens to describe her rather well. Freja can give a song its footing, but she is equally capable of changing its direction when the bass needs to become a voice of its own.
Freja first met Lovibond on a delayed train from London to Edinburgh, where both were travelling to attend a small music festival. A long conversation about records, songwriting and the value of restraint led to a friendship. Lovibond heard her play later, and what had begun as an easy conversation about music became a working relationship as well.
Away from the work, Freja remains difficult to hurry and harder to fluster. She tends not to waste words, does not perform her personality for a room, and is perfectly comfortable allowing silence to stand. Her resistance is somewhat less impressive when kladdkaka is involved.
Eliza Fairhaven
Lead Electric Guitar • Harmony Vocals
Eliza Fairhaven is a Barrow-in-Furness-born, Bideford-based lead electric guitarist and harmony vocalist with Lovibond and the Pangs of Conscious.
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Elizabeth “Eliza” Fairhaven comes from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, and plays lead electric guitar and sings harmony with the Pangs of Conscious. Self-taught from the age of eleven, she grew up learning music without much money or equipment, developing instead through persistence, a good ear and an increasingly exact idea of what a song needs. Guitar is her principal instrument and the centre of her musical voice.
Eliza came to the Pangs in early October 2025 after seeing an advert for a lead guitarist on a national musicians’ noticeboard. Rather than send a conventional résumé, she travelled to Bideford. After a short conversation, Lovibond began one of her songs on guitar, Freja joined her on piano, and Eliza was asked to play. She listened for a moment, found her place and improvised the part into the song. Lovibond and Freja had been looking for a guitarist; they had found a musician with a rather broader usefulness.
Her playing is melodic and economical, built around the belief that the right line matters more than the largest number of notes. She can give a quiet arrangement definition without crowding it, but there is considerably more weight in her playing when a song gives her permission to use it. That range became part of the Pangs’ developing sound on When the Apple Blossoms are in Bloom, the first Rowanwood album to feature her.
Eliza sings harmony with the same discipline she brings to her instruments: clear, mature and concerned with the shape of the whole performance rather than attracting attention to the part itself. Offstage she is similarly economical—self-possessed, difficult to impress and armed with a dry Cumbrian sense of humour. Her musical patience is less economical. She has been known to pursue a guitar line past the point of common sense and then regard the discovery of one good chord as sufficient compensation for almost anything.
These days Eliza is thoroughly at home among the Pangs, but she has lost none of the determination that brought her south in the first place. In a small Bideford room filled with instruments, notebooks and a proper windowsill garden, she remains what she was at that first audition: a musician who listens first, finds the opening, and then makes it count.
