West Texas quartet Holy Wave come from the border town of El Paso and make shimmering, psychedelic dream pop from their current home in Austin.
Like most people who write about music I get loads of emails every day with new tunes by artists old and new. All of them compete for attention because even the most optimistic PR doesn’t expect anyone to read beyond the subject field and the first paragraph or two.
Consequently, down the years I’ve developed a radar that means I’m pretty good at knowing right away whether or not I’ll be interested.
Sometimes it’s the name of the band, or where they come from, or the video, or the photo; other times it’s the name of the song, or the label, or just a familiar PR with a good track record.
Pretty much all of the above applied with this song, Nothing In The Dark by an Austin band called Holy Wave, released on Suicide Squeeze Records.
As soon as I clicked play and heard the intro – a gently repetitive drumbeat, smooth serene vocals, tape-warbled synths and arpeggiated guitar chords – I knew I was going to carry on.
Then it all starts to disintegrate into a shimmering, psychedelic haze with jet streams of fuzz, and I knew I’d play it again. And again.
Ryan Fuson, the band’s singer, says he was inspired to write this song by a tarot reading at the height of the pandemic, when he drew the Five of Cups, a card said to represent a forlorn dwelling on the past and an inability to see positive things in the present.
“I was really sure that the music world was finished and it seemed like internet aggression and, well, aggression in general was at an all-time high, so I was ready to stop playing music,” Fuson says.
“It could be so easy to become jaded and pessimistic and I had to really decide what perspective I was going to take.” Fortunately he carried on with the band he had formed in the border town of El Paso with his childhood friends Joey Cook, Kyle Hager, and Julian Ruiz.
Early in their career they pushed their psychedelia into dreamy pop, evolving into tripped-out instrumentation as they steered away from sun-bleached nostalgia towards a colour-saturated dimension where sounds of the past, present, and future intermingled.
That wanderlust eventually prompted their relocation to the state’s music capital of Austin and music that filters dark elements through a lens, bending them into a kaleidoscope of light.