Scott Holiday Finds a New Shape for Himself on Topology
Scott Holiday has spent decades being recognizable through the sound of a guitar. Topology changes that relationship. The debut album from his HOL1D4Y project places the Rival Sons guitarist at the center as writer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and, for the first time on his own recordings, lead singer. That shift makes the nine-track album feel less like a side project than a deliberate redefinition of what his authorship can contain.
The title supplies the governing metaphor. Topology is the branch of mathematics concerned with forms that can bend and stretch while retaining essential properties. Holiday turns that concept inward, asking what remains recognizable in a person after experience changes the shape of a life. The idea is cerebral on paper, but the record keeps returning it to sound, sensation and physical groove.
Opening track “Holotropic,” now accompanied by a new performance video, gathers many of those concerns immediately. Fuzzed guitars, vintage synthesizers and a locked-in rhythm support lyrics about shifting color, unwinding time, astral wandering and altered points of view. The song also circles back to the “Veridream” established earlier in the campaign, linking dreams and perception across the album.
The band in the “Holotropic” video reinforces how collaborative Holiday’s singular vision remains. Michael Miley handles drums, Jesse Nason contributes keyboards, Aaron Danks plays guitar, and Aaron Eisenberg appears as a multi-instrumentalist while also serving as visual director. Holiday plays guitar, bass and sings, occupying a role that would have seemed unfamiliar at the beginning of the album’s creation.
Topology originally grew from a daily studio practice in which Holiday made riffs, melodies, rhythms and textures without demanding finished songs from them. Much of the project was conceived as instrumental music. A serious bicycle accident, which left him with six broken ribs, a shoulder injury and a head injury, forced a period of stillness. During recovery, the unfinished pieces began suggesting stories and words.
That origin makes the instrumentals “Constellations,” “CRISM” and “Love of Separation” essential rather than transitional. They preserve the record’s first language while songs such as “Panoptic,” “Metacognition,” “Equanimity,” “Autonomatic,” “Veridream” and “Holotropic” explore perception through lyrics. Miley’s improvised drum performances and Nason’s Moog, Mellotron, Oberheim and Prophet textures give the album a warm analog foundation beneath Holiday’s fuzz-heavy guitar work.
Photo credit: Rick Horn
Out now via Sacred Tongue Recordings / Thirty Tigers, Topology succeeds because its transformation is audible without becoming a simple accident-and-recovery narrative. “Holotropic” is an ideal opening statement and current focus because it places the album’s old and new selves together: groove and abstraction, guitar identity and vocal vulnerability, control and altered perception. Holiday bends the shape of his career without losing the musical instincts that made it recognizable.
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