Holy Fuck have today released their incredible new single “Free Gloss,” featuring Pond front-man Nicholas Allbrook and taken from their upcoming album Deleter, out January 17th. The record was teased recently by first single “Luxe” (featuring Alexis Taylor), which was A-Listed at 6Music and saw the band tour with Hot Chip in addition to playing a quickly-sold-out European headline tour of their own. Now, the band has announced a spring run of North American tour dates in support of Deleter, stopping through Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver and more. Tickets go on sale December 6th at 10:00 AM local time. For the full list of dates, and to see the “Free Gloss” video directed by Haoyan of America, see below.
“Our music can be dark and pummelling at times, unrelenting even,” write Holy Fuck. “Free Gloss’ was designed as a way for us to shed some light, and bring some bliss and buoyancy to the table whilst still maintaining that ecstatic energy and intensity that we love. We started tinkering with the main riff and structure on this one as an idea to take the listener on a euphoric sonic journey and explore the push/pull, tension and release you can take people with on the dance floor.”
For Holy Fuck, their new album is partly an attempt to “make peace” with the dance music that was popular during their adolescence – an adolescence largely spent in the company of Black Sabbath rather than Black Box.
“We were trying to step out of the corner we’ve been painted into. Now we’re more in the dance world than ever. And this is the kind of dance music we like. In many different ways ‘Free Gloss’ reminds us all of some kind of 90s thing. When we wrote the main keyboard riff, immediately we thought of Much Music, our Canadian equivalent to MTV, specifically their live dance studio broadcast, Electric Circus or their compilation album Extenda-Dance Mix 93. The inadvertent soundtrack to our youth. Looking back on it now, these shows explored a clash of humanity with technology, or perhaps the humanity in technology; repetitive electronic music with unpredictable human movement, which feels in keeping with the way we write and perform our music.”
“Free Gloss” is a bracing highlight from Holy Fuck’s upcoming fifth album, Deleter. A band who have played by their own rules for the past part of 15 years, it’s the most accomplished moment yet from a group who have become one of their country’s finest, and most influential, exports; seamlessly fusing the gauzy drive of krautrock and deep house’s dreamy ineffability, and expertly blending purring motorik percussion with the sort of fuggy synthetic fizz that so often sends clubbers into states of unselfconscious rapture.
Arriving at a moment where attention spans are shot and anxieties are going into overdrive, Deleter is a defiantly full-bodied affair. Polyrhythmic and pleasure- focused, it’s a record that explores what happens when humanity and technology coalesce into one big, semi-organic celebration of spontaneity, repetition, and individuality. As the band puts it, “the robots are smarter than ever, and the algorithm knows more and more what we like as individuals, but we have to remind ourselves that there is music in the margins that can go missing and that that music is more important than ever.” Marginal or not, Deleter is the sound of Holy Fuck freely ebbing and flowing in their own unique ecosystem. As a listener you’ve got a choice – carry on with the passive consumption, or push back, engage, and move to something worth your time. Something like Deleter.
Holy Fuck Tour Dates:
03/23/20 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar – Tickets
02/24/20 – San Diego, CA @ Casbah – Tickets
03/25/20 – Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room – Tickets
03/27/20 – Los Angeles, CA @ El Rey Theatre – Tickets
03/28/20 – San Francisco, CA @ Slim’s – Tickets
03/30/20 – Portland, OR @ Lola’s Room – Tickets
03/31/20 – Seattle, WA @ Nuemos – Tickets
04/01/20 – Vancouver, BC @ Fortune Sound Club – Tickets
04/03/20 – Calgary, AB @ Broken City – Tickets
04/04/20 – Saskatoon, SK @ Amigo’s Cantina – Tickets
04/06/20 – St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club – Tickets
04/07/20 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall – Tickets
04/24/20 – Antwerp, BE @ Trix
04/25/20 – Luxembourg @ Out of The Crowd Festival
04/27/20 – Birmingham, UK @ The Hare & Hounds
04/28/20 – Brighton, UK @ Chalk
04/29/20 – Cardiff, UK @ Clwb lfor Bach
04/30/20 – Manchester, UK @ Yes (basement)
05/03/20 – Glasgow, UK @ Slag & Dagger Festival
05/05/20 – Barcelona, ES @ La Nau
05/06/20 – Oviedo, ES @ La Lata de Zinc
05/07/20 – Vigo, ES @ Radar Estudios
05/09/20 – Valencia, ES @ La Pérgola
05/23/20 – London, UK @ All Points East