Music for the lost: In their music, HOLYGRAM combine Post-Punk and New Wave with Krautrock and Shoegaze elements to a stubborn, multi-layered and modern homage to the sound of the 80s with a definite look into the future: driving, dark and full of catchiness moments. The different influences of the five band members who gathered in the vibrant music landscape of Cologne in 2015 are unmistakable: NEW ORDER meets NEU! Their unpretentious treatment of their own role models is the proof that the view into the past must inevitably also be directed forward. Skilfully incompatible merges to form the soundtrack of a city that looks threatening in the dim light.The band, which is always wrapped live in dense fog and cool light, has played at numerous festivals such as the Mailbox Derby, Wave Gotik Treffen or New Waves Day and accompanied the British formation OMD on their EU Tour 2017. At the end of the year, the Cologne based band will present the debut album ‘Modern Cults’ live on an extensive support tour with VNV NATION in Europe and America.
The long-player builds on the self-titled EP, which was released in 2016, and intensifies HOLYGRAM’s engagement with the complex of urban topics. Alienation and anonymity, hope and memory, love and identity: The reflections in terms of content are always in close interaction with the band’s striking sound. The atmosphere of the songs moves between the brutal noise of a big city and the fragility of the people who lose themselves in it. Sharp-minded observed scenarios of a decaying world in which the individual no longer plays the main role.
The total of 11 songs have been written in recent years and have already been partially tested live. Songs like the title track ‘Modern Cults’ or the spherical ‘Still There’ follow the protagonists on a nocturnal trip through clubs, flashbacks, run-down neighbourhoods and the shoals of the human psyche. The diversity of the cityscape as a reflection of the human being is the Ariadne thread, which the five musicians hand over to the listener in order not to get lost in the stylistic range. Because HOLYGRAM do not see themselves as a band of a certain genre. Moody guitar walls (Distant Light) alternate with uplifting bass runs (Hideaway), under-cooled synthesizers meet stoic-driving rhythms and together form the projection screen for the ambivalent stories that tell HOLYGRAM in their music. If you go through forgotten places in a broken relationship in 1997, the song ‘She’s like the sun’ ironically confronts you with the failure to reach unattainable goals. Autobiography blurs with fiction, the past with the present, and becomes a simultaneously oppressive as well as hope-seeking vision of human (co-) existence: Man in the fog of his own dreams at the crossroads between outside and inside, between appearance and being.
This is also where the first single, ‘Signals’ (release: 7 Sept), whose wavy robe fooled over the emotionally torn text and raises the deeply melancholy chorus to the poppy hymn (“Sometimes when I close my eyes I see you walk away / and every time the sun comes up the feeling is the same”). It becomes clear that the human being in this world is just a cogwheel in a larger, independent machine.
Patrick Blümel (vocals), Sebastian Heer (drums), Marius Lansing (guitar), Pilo Lenger (synthesizers) and Bennett Reimann (bass) have joined forces with Maurizio Baggio for the production of the recordings, recorded at Amen Studio in Cologne, who is responsible for SOFT MOON’s albums ‘Deeper’ and ‘Criminal’. Together they worked on the already established sound of the band and extended it with many facets. The debut album, ‘Modern Cults’, will be released on 9 November 2018 via SPV / Cleopatra Records. Pre-order album here: https://Holygram.lnk.to/ModernCults
Tour Dates
EUROPE with VNV Nation
Oct 12 - Dresden (DE), Alter Schlachthof
Oct 13 - Erfurt (DE), Stadtgarten
Oct 14 - Stuttgart (DE), Im Wizemann
Oct 16 - Prague (CZE), Futurum
Oct 17 - Warsaw (PL), Progresja
Oct 19 - Eindhoven (NL), Effenaar
Oct 20 - Cologne (DE), E-Werk
Oct 21 - Sint Niklaas (BL), De Casino
Oct 23 - Amsterdam (NL), Melkweg
Oct 24 - Bielefeld (DE), Ringlokschuppen
Oct 26 - Berlin (DE), Columbiahalle
Oct 27 - Magdeburg (DE), Altes Theater
Oct 28 - Munich (DE), Muffathalle
Oct 30 - Frankfurt (a.M.) (DE), Batschkapp
Oct 31 - Leipzig (DE), Haus Leipzig
Nov 01 - Rostock (DE), M.A.U. Club
Nov 02 - Hamburg (DE), Mehr Theater am Großmarkt
RELEASE SHOW in Germany
Nov 09 - Cologne (DE), Gebäude 9 (with Whispering Sons & Swirlpool)
Source: Press Release
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