Those Holy – have shared the new single ‘Bruises’

Cold celtic electronics, and they mean it: coldwave, gothic pop and industrial noise pared down to something stark and minimal, built for the club’s dimmest hour, hypnotic and repetitive, the vocals held at a distance while the rhythm pulls you under. Sparse and a little inhuman by design, closer to a ritual than a set.

Second single ‘Bruises’ turns the fight inward: the pressure to conform and stay in line set against the urge to do something raw and instinctive. “It’s about the psychological toll of constantly being at war with yourself,” says singer Lucy Grey.

Slow and almost trance-like, its Celtic textures run underneath a low tempo club track that took shape onstage, worked out over a run of clubnights before being cut to tape. “There’s a lot of space,” says producer Chrissy Connor, “but I think that makes it more danceable.“

Producer Chrissy Connor grew up in Newry “with a feeling of otherness,” drawn young to weird, heavy, gothic music; Grey came up in a small North Wales village, just as out of step with what surrounded her. Both carry their heritage with them here, just not the version that gets sold back on postcards. Where “Celtic” usually conjures something misty and sentimental, Those Holy pull it somewhere colder, sparser and club-shaped. “We want to subvert that for sure,” says Connor. “But those sentimental sounds and images are important; we don’t want to take away from them, but add to them”.

The result keeps that thread buried, in the texture rather than the melody. Beneath a rhythm that holds in 4, the textures, Connor says, “make me think of some sort of gnarly uilleann pipes or ancient horns,” the Celtic element “understated, lurking. You might miss it, and I like that.” Grey carries it in the language too, singing at times in Welsh, “a beautiful language in its own right,” she says, “full of texture and rhythm,” with words “that don’t quite translate into English.“

The method is as deliberate as the sound is cold. No laptops, every part played live on hardware, the unpredictable Lyra synth among them, an instrument Connor reckons “you can never really fully control, merely steer.” An early, cleanly multitracked version was scrapped for diluting their performances; they cut the whole EP again live, straight to tape. “We needed it to be murky,” says Connor. “Like a bog.”

Those Holy were a live band before they were a record, and the dim rooms they came up in are pressed into everything, “music for the night,” as Connor puts it. Chief among them is Quarry, the Liverpool venue that  reopened last year on the former site of 60s haunt The Sink, it keeps a standing place for gothy, experimental and leftfield sound. They’ve sharpened the live set opening for Liturgy, Dame Area, Autumns, Tolouse Low Trax and Topographies, and recently stepped up for a large London show with Mandy, Indiana. 

Momentum is gathering around a project that’s still, pointedly, self-released.

Those Holy are Chrissy Connor and Lucy Grey.

Tracklisting
1. Bodies
2. New Skin
3. Bruises
4. Obey

Those Holy Live Dates
15 Aug – Liverpool @ District (Frogfest)
27 Aug – Liverpool @ Quarry
 2 Sep – Manchester @ The Abbey