The Holy Knives is composed of brothers Kyle and Kody Valentine, whose music layers baritone vocals over Western soundscapes with downtempo grooves. Born and raised in New Orleans and now residing in San Antonio, The Holy Knives are gearing up to release their new EP Always Gone. Instead of a traditional release, the duo is parsing out the music as a series of singles with at least a song a month for the remainder of the year.
The Holy Knives took their name from a combination of two of their favorite works of art, the film “The Holy Mountain” by Alejandro Jodorowsky and the poetry book The Singing Knives by Frank Stanford. Both of these works, while of different mediums, conjure a flood of beautiful, thought-provoking imagery, as well as share a fearlessness and a quest for truth through the irrational that The Holy Knives strives to capture in their music.
Drawing musical inspiration from acts such as Portishead, Leonard Cohen, The Arctic Monkeys, and Timber Timbre. The Holy Knives could be imagined performing at the Bang Bang Bar from Twin Peaks or playing in a True Detective episode. Their belief is that music is a sacred weapon you can use to ward off the march of reality.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the band’s newest single, “Cathedral”, a song that fuses hazy and dramatic beats with western guitar and ominous crooning. Similar to the modernized country western sound of acts like Orville Peck, the band takes traditional sounds and flips them on their head. The big beats imbue a a dark 80s synth pop sound that comes together with the guitar and vocals to give the song a sense of cinematic mystery.
The band explains the inspiration behind the song in their own words:
“‘Cathedral’ is a chopped and screwed western love song inspired by Gamer Girl Bath Water. It’s about the kind of love that comes from being so obsessed with someone that you’ve never met and will probably never meet, but you would still drink her bath water. It’s about the rabid love that you can’t get out of your head every night. I was putting myself in the shoes of people who fall in love with fantasies that they project onto real people via the internet. It’s a strange new breed of love that deserves its own type of love song.”
Listen to the “Cathedral” and read our short chat with the band below…
What are your greatest strengths as a band?
At the end of 2019, we realized one of our greatest strengths as a band is that we write pretty much every day. We’ve written a couple hundred verses and choruses in the past two years, which we know not everybody does. We also assessed what we had been doing and saw that we didn’t release any music in 2019, and saw the disconnect between our strengths and our plan of action. This epiphany was what sparked our idea to release at least a song a month in 2020. We also strive to be unique. What we are honing is something wholly our own. Maybe we haven’t actualized that yet, but where we are going is a place where our music is our music, and no one else’s.
Tell me your 5 year plan as a band, what are you looking to accomplish?
We are always striving toward the monumental goal of creating timeless art. That is what everything we do revolves around. We are always trying to get better as musicians and artists to get closer to that goal step by step. Consequently, our 5 year plan is centered around writing relentlessly in order to keep chasing that goal. We also hope to work with other artists that we love and connect with as many people as possible through music. Music is such a strong force for connecting people and we always see that as a goal of our creations. Expanding the vision of the band and the worlds in which we create will also be essential to our continued growth and pursuit of our goal of making timeless music. In 2020, artists have opportunities to create worlds that expand beyond music because of the media-rich world we live in now. We just really hope to continue to grow as artists and people and keep striving toward creating something great.
How do you feel about the current state of the music industry? What works and what doesn’t? How do you fit into the current model? What do you focus on the most as a band?
The current state of the music industry is interesting because there seems to be an emerging middle class of artists who can make a living off their art without being “famous”. Many of the gatekeepers like record labels and press outlets play smaller roles now, and artists now have direct access to their fans through social media platforms unlike any previous time in history. This is a good thing. However, the lower barrier to entry means more people are making and releasing music (there are 24,000 songs released every day on Spotify, last time I checked), so it’s harder for younger artists to break through the increased volume of noise. We’re trying to adapt our release plan to fit the current streaming model and all that it entails, which has influenced our move to release a song a month this year. It feels much more like a publish or perish mentality these days, rather than working on an album for years behind the scenes, which, in today’s world, almost instantly disappears if you don’t get the right recognition out of the gate.
