Two years since Holy Holy’s critically acclaimed 2015 debut LP, captivating sold-out audiences across Australia, to London and The Netherlands and a complete band-restructure, the Aussie outfit are now back with a considerable departure from their previous sound.
Joined now by bandmates Ryan Strathie, Matt Redlich and Graham Ritchie, Holy Holy’s singer-songwriter Timothy Carroll and guitarist and composer Oscar Dawson have created a cohesive and focused LP titled Paint that have launched them back to the forefront of the music scene.
“There is a sense in which we consciously tried to develop the sound and thought about what we were doing and what we were trying to achieve, and I think that sub-consciously we wanted to try some new things out and develop our sounds, but that’s based on a lot of things that are out of our control; the fact that when we started this second record, the band was established, and we did it as a collective so we had that to work from that as a starting point,” Dawson says.
“The fact that by the time we started working on the second record, we’d done a bunch of touring so what we were playing live and enjoying to play live had an impact on what we then wanted to write,” he says, “There’s all these things that just seem to happen without us controlling them. There is an element of control to how you want to make things, but at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do – it is what it is.”
Featuring the #1 most played track at triple j track ‘Darwinism’, subsequent offering ‘Elevator’, and the striking single ‘That Message’, Holy Holy’s new album was released back in February and arrived at #7 on the ARIA chart album. Rich in experimentation, both lyrically and instrumentally, each track delves deeper into the band’s immense artistic capabilities whilst delivering their unique sound. This form of their music is expressed in the simple title of the record, which Dawson says helped the band focus the spellbinding record, which has been a long time in the making since the latter part of 2015.
“Tim actually suggested the title before we finished the record so we had it as a moniker in the back of our heads during the making of the record, and there was a degree to which we wanted to focus the record in a different way to the first one, and that involved having a band and working together as a band more, and I think the natural by-product of that is that the record making process was a bit more vibrant,” he says.
“There are moments when you are playing in a band when you have less control over what’s happening and collaborating on ideas and have to let go a bit more, and I think the word ‘paint’ to us, there are the obvious connotations of paint which are colours, and textures, smears, but there is also an empty concept at the time, and it can mean so many different things. Having just one bold word title kind of helped us write towards – those are the ideas around it.”
As for the striking cover art by Newcastle based expressionist artist James Drinkwater, Dawson says it was a perfect fit for the album which the guys will soon be taking to the road.
“We had all these different ideas on how we visually represent ‘Paint’ and the idea of the album. There’s obvious ways to do it, and we looked at those and the less obvious ways to sum it up and approximate it with the artwork and we got in touch with our old friend James and his artwork just thought fit so perfectly. Initially I was worried that it was just going to be too obvious to have a painting as a cover of an album called paint but then we kind of sat with it and it just kind of made sense; it’s not just it being a painting, but the style of painting he does and the use of colour and colour schemes and how they seem chaotic and almost uncontrolled at first, and it is that, but it’s also controlled – it really summed up the record.”
When & Where: Wool Exchange Entertainment Complex, Geelong – June 29. Tickets available via the website.
Written by Talia Rinaldo