Holy Wave - "i'm DADA"

h-music8

Sep 24

3 min read

Album cover for Holy Wave's "i'm DADA": a painted illustration of a man in a red room eating an apple beside houseplants, looking through a large window at a burning house next to a garden with people watering plants, sunbathing by a pool, and a dog playing, with a Siamese cat and vases in the foreground and handwritten track titles along the border.

On July 10th, Austin psych-rock veterans Holy Wave released their eighth studio album, i'm DADA, via Suicide Squeeze Records. Ten tracks, forty-five minutes, and a record that trades some of the band's trademark haze for something more grounded, without losing the atmosphere that's defined them since the early 2010s.

Formed by Ryan Fuson, Kyle Hager, Joseph Cook and Julian Ruiz, who grew up together in El Paso's DIY scene before relocating to Austin, Holy Wave stepped outside the U.S. for this one, recording at El Derrumbe studio in Ensenada, Mexico alongside experimental duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, with additional sessions at Studio 22 in Los Angeles. The change of scenery shows: where earlier records like Five of Cups leaned into dreamy drift, i'm DADA feels more deliberate, featuring grooves that settle instead of dissolve, repetitions that accumulate weight rather than just wash over you.

The title plays a double game: it nods to the early-20th-century Dada art movement, but frontman Kyle Hager has also described the phrase more plainly, as a song about balance, about showing up as a parent while still holding onto some version of yourself. That tension between chaos and control runs through the whole record, and it shows in the arrangements themselves: tracks like "US 54" and "happy song" open the album on tighter, more propulsive footing than past Holy Wave records, guitars locking into repeating figures instead of drifting past each other. Lead single "s33.u.in/HAL" sets the tone early, all hallucinatory shoegaze guitar and half-static transmission, built, in Fuson's words, around a kind of prayer to an imperfect god we're raising to save us later. Its guitar lines bend and smear at the edges while the rhythm section holds a surprisingly steady line underneath. Elsewhere, "lull" and the title track lean into slower, more spacious arrangements, closer to the band's dream-pop instincts, while closer "dewey's dirge" strips things back to something closer to a lament, guitars ringing out over a slow-motion groove. Across the record, the four-piece leans harder on repetition and groove than on the widescreen reverb washes of earlier albums like Five of Cups: the hooks are still hazy, but they're built to loop in your head rather than just float past.

It's a record that sounds like a band sharpening its instincts rather than reinventing them: still hypnotic, still built for headphones and long drives, just a little more sure of where it's going.

Listen: i'm DADA on Bandcamp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO6cPEcMmEs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjox_JXa8eM

Holy Wave is featured on our Alt playlist.

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