Last year, Austin psych veterans Holy Wave impressed us with “Time Crisis Too,” their contribution to a split with Suicide Squeeze labelmates Chastity Belt. The lead single from Holy Wave’s upcoming album is even more impressive, and you can hear it now.
In July, the band will release i’m DADA, the follow-up to 2023’s Five Of Cups. It’s preceded today by the unconventionally titled “s33.u.in/HAL,” which adds splashes of hallucinatory shoegaze guitar to the group’s steady-handed psych-pop songwriting. Holy Wave’s Ryan Fuson offers a detailed backstory for the track:
“s33.u.in/HAL” is like a prayer to the God of shortcomings, a child God that we are raising to one day be our savior. It was one of the first ideas we worked on for the album, but also one of the last songs we finished. I was listening to a lot of Wagon Christ at the time and wanted the song to basically be a Wagon Christ rip-off, but it just didn’t feel right. Big surprise, that was a tall order. So the song was shelved to the “maybe the next album” part of the new song catalog. Then, late in our demoing phase, Joey and Julian showed up to practice with some ideas for it. We played around with them, and the song literally just started to write itself. We finished that day with essentially the song done, sans lyrics and some finishing details, and it instantly became one of our favorites. I still hope we put out the other version some day, but this is by far the better of the two.
A big robot dances in the “s33.u.in/HAL” video. Watch it below.
TRACKLIST:
01 “US 54
02 “s33.u.in/HAL
03 “happy song
04 “first DAE
05 “lull
06 “i’m DADA
07 “unison
08 “too one
09 “to the other
10 “dewey’s dirge
i’m DADA is out 7/10 on Suicide Squeeze. Pre-order it here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
