Features Track By Track: Holiday Shores - New Masses For Squaw Peak

Holiday Shores talk us through their latest album ‘New Masses For Squaw Peak’ and give us an exclusive preview of the record to share with you, dear readers.

Airglow This is a tribute to the sky and space. Some liquid sections of this stick to unpolished surfaces.

We Couldn’t Be Together This song start off with just the theme that occurs twice throughout it. The organ gently laps up against 12 string pulls. Start from the theme and work your way out from there. We wanted to make something that would keep you warm as you walk through a eastern city.

Threepeat Got Old The electronic percussion cloud that rests in the centre of this song was one of our favourite directions the album took. Trying to create a melodic element out of a percussive instrument and creating a bed of melody for the rest of the instruments propels the momentum. It’s liquid when it wants to be.

Ocotillo Dripping A late night blend created against muted episodes of Next Gen in an attempt to imagine a 5th world coronation celebration for a regional desert overseer was the main effort of this decent. Stringy bass ripples were created, as a means to merge the energies of ‘Threepeat Got Old’ into the more rigidly crafted jaunt of ‘Spells’.

Spells We found ourselves in the same setting as ‘We Couldn’t Be Together’, (ice walls, etc), but wanted to push things in a more direct manner. This is a two part song all rolled up into one lane.

Squaw Peak This is the sunrise portion of the album. It breaks right over a series of Mesas probably two to three miles outside of your window. I’d like to thank Harry Dean Stanton for his performance in Paris, Texas for this.

Mystic Pharoahs We found ourselves reading solely about the flesh and blood gods of a million years ago, the ones who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in nuclear blast. I wanted to think about their prat sons running the earth carelessly in their father’s steads. We also wanted to fit the beat from Proud Mary by CCR into a song.

Coming To Shores This was the first piece written for the record. It was performed once and recorded only once. Coming to shores from the middle of the woods, you can see as far out as you want.

Cord-Du-Roi Sometimes we have a notion for a second about becoming old and the feeling that you’ll see the world in some stretched time warped line, like pulling a strand of gum out of your mouth.

New Masses This was a recorded from a loop I made before a soundcheck in Miami. The voices adding up in the background made it feel like a morning mass in some sort of tangent universe. Synth communion

Injun This was originally an ode to the fallen satellite that was crippled by bands of radiation circling the globe after a nuclear warhead was detonated in space. The deep pull from this being a theme about being stuck in some perma-evolution that never bears fruit, or breaks orbit.

Shade Spun Gold Somewhere in Wyoming there’s a dude looking for a plot of land to live on for the rest of his existence.