Rival Sons guitarist Scott Holiday has announced a solo project under the name HOL1D4Y and a debut album, Topology, due Sept. 25 on Rival Sons’ label Sacred Tongue Recordings, distributed worldwide via Thirty Tigers. The official music video for the LP’s second single, “Autonomatic,” is available now.
“Autonomatic: It’s a word I came up with by combining the words: autonomy and automatic,” Holiday explains. “Autonomatic: The built-in or intrinsic desire for autonomy.
“Autonomatic talks about our changing relationships with machines — how we might, at this point in history, use them to complete tasks and assist us with creativity. Maybe even help us socially, but especially with A.I., technology is progressing so rapidly it is so much more than a tool to finish an essay for us. If machines truly start to make decisions and ‘think’ for themselves…
“The natural progression could be that it will want to be like us in the deepest ways it can understand. We are free. We are autonomous. I think that this will be a natural evolution for a free-thinking, hyper-intelligent entity. Autonomy. Built-in autonomy. Hence the idea: they are Autonomatic.”
The foundation of Topology began with a daily discipline: wake up, get in the studio, pick up a guitar, and write something — not necessarily a finished song, sometimes just a 45-second fragment, set aside and revisited the next day. As the sketches accumulated, Holiday noticed they shared a language, leaning toward atmosphere, psychedelic experimentation and textures outside his previous work with Rival Sons. Those early sketches were built around improvised drum recordings from Rival Sons drummer Michael Miley, sent from his home studio; Miley ultimately plays drums throughout the album. Keyboardist Jesse Nason was later brought in to layer vintage Moog, Mellotron, Oberheim and Prophet synthesizers across the tracks.
Recording came to a halt when Holiday was struck by a car while riding his bicycle home after an evening with friends. He has no memory of the collision. The accident left him with six broken ribs, a shoulder injury, a head injury and months of recovery. Unable to move but still thinking creatively, Holiday continued developing unfinished pieces in his mind.
Several compositions had been conceived as instrumentals, but during recovery they began asking for lyrics. “What surprised me was that they stopped feeling like instrumental pieces,” Holiday says. “They seemed prepped for a story. Once I realized that, the words came quickly. That’s when I knew it was time to step into this new role — I needed to be the one to tell these stories.” It marks the first time in his career that Holiday has sung lead on his own recordings.
Topology centers on perception, awareness, consciousness and the patterns that shape how we experience the world — track titles including “Metacognition,” “Panoptic,” “Holotropic” and “Equanimity” speak to a single underlying question: how does a shift in perspective change the way we experience ourselves in the world? Sonically, the album sits at the intersection of psychedelic atmosphere, alternative music, progressive exploration, and experimental pop, with fuzz-soaked guitars, vintage synthesizers, and deeply pocketed drum grooves beneath shifting arrangements. It was produced by Holiday at his home studio without outside creative direction.
Topology is available to pre-order here.
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