Holy Wave - 'Nothing In The Dark'
Texas band Holy Wave release brand new lo-fi single ‘Nothing In The Dark’ ahead of their forthcoming album Five Of Cups.
In the early days of their budding career, Holy Wave specialised in psychedelic dream pop seasoned with epic guitar lines. Their origin story is organic – the childhood friends Fuson, Joey Cook, Kyle Hager, and Julian Ruiz hail from El Paso where they worked their way up gigging from venue to venue. Frequent adventures to catch other bands live across the Southwest prompted their move to Austin, a lively city that has birthed iconic artists like Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin.
Following a string of recent tracks ‘Happier’ and ‘Bog Song’, their latest single ‘Nothing In The Dark’ is an intricate earworm, backed by a propulsive drumbeat and layered with tape-warbled synths, arpeggiated guitar chords and fuzzy reverb.
The band's Joey Cook commented on the track: "Nothing in the Dark is about how easy it is to let fear take over and control what you do and don’t do, how distractions can keep you from the things you want or disguise themselves as what you want. But when the light disappears from your life, like shadows, the distractions fade away, and you’re left with just yourself and the darkness. The song is about moving past the fear of the shadows; you can see in the light so that you don’t end up sitting alone in the dark."
With quarantine limitations, the aural explorers found unlikely inspiration in a Tarot card reading at the height of the pandemic. This brought about the title of their sixth full-length album Five Of Cups. In Tarot readings, the Five of Cups card signifies loss and grief and is generally interpreted as representing a forlorn dwelling on the past and an inability to appreciate the positive things in the present. In spite of this ‘Nothing In The Dark’ signifies a bright new perspective for the Austin-based band, a winning psych-rock gem to add to their eclectic kaleidoscope of sound.
Words by Oliver Evans
