Rival Sons’ Scott Holiday charts a psychedelic new course with HOL1D4Y
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Newsdesk
After decades spent shaping the heavy, blues-rooted sound of Rival Sons, guitarist Scott Holiday is opening a separate creative lane under the name HOL1D4Y. His debut album, TOPOLOGY, arrives September 25 through Sacred Tongue Recordings and Thirty Tigers, with lead single “Veridream” offering the first indication of how far he intends to travel from familiar ground.
The track is built from recognizable pieces of Holiday’s musical vocabulary, particularly his dense guitar tone and instinct for memorable riffs, but they are rearranged within a stranger and increasingly dreamlike setting. Fuzz guitar drifts through vintage synthesizers, tightly coiled drums, and a vocal performance that feels intentionally understated. The result sits somewhere between psychedelic rock, progressive pop, and cinematic alternative music without settling comfortably into one category.
“Veridream” takes its title from an invented term describing the desire to become the freer, less constrained version of oneself that appears in dreams. That definition could easily have tipped into heavy-handed self-help language, yet the song maintains a certain ambiguity. Holiday does not attempt to explain the idea completely. Instead, the production creates an unstable mental space where possibility and uncertainty coexist.
That open-ended quality is important to the broader HOL1D4Y project. TOPOLOGY began with a simple daily practice in Holiday’s home studio: pick up a guitar and write something, even if the result lasted less than a minute. Over time, those short fragments began to reveal a shared atmosphere and a different set of creative priorities from his work with Rival Sons.
Longtime bandmate Michael Miley provided improvised drum performances that Holiday cut, rearranged, and used as rhythmic foundations. Keyboardist Jesse Nason later added Moog, Mellotron, Oberheim, and Prophet synthesizers, helping the music expand into a textured, retro-futurist environment. Holiday remained firmly in control of the process, editing, arranging, producing, and eventually singing the material himself.
The decision to add vocals came during an enforced pause. Holiday was struck by a car while cycling home, suffering six broken ribs, a shoulder injury, and a head injury. During his recovery, several compositions that had initially been intended as instrumentals began to suggest narratives. Those pieces ultimately led him to take on the role of lead vocalist for the first time on his own recordings.
That background gives “Veridream” additional context, though the song does not require a dramatic biography to hold attention. Its strongest feature may be its restraint. The track has a substantial sound, but it avoids turning every section into a showcase for Holiday’s guitar playing. Synthesizers, rhythm, negative space, and vocal phrasing are given room to define the mood.
Across nine tracks and 46 minutes, TOPOLOGY promises to explore perception, consciousness, technology, separation, and the hidden connections between apparently distant ideas. Titles including “Metacognition,” “Panoptic,” “Holotropic,” and “Equanimity” suggest an album interested in interior states as much as physical force.
For listeners expecting a direct continuation of Rival Sons, “Veridream” may initially feel disorienting. That appears to be part of the point. HOL1D4Y gives Scott Holiday the space to follow ideas that might sit awkwardly inside the framework of his primary band, and his first single makes that independence sound worthwhile.
TOPOLOGY will be released September 25 as a nine-track double vinyl album. “Veridream” is available now, alongside an official video directed by Aaron Eisenberg and Holiday.
