On his striking debut album, the multi-instrumentalist defines his songwriting: sincere, multi-dimensional, and full of heart
Photos by Arthur Harris-Eze
Girard Avenue is one of the largest commercial and residential streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There’s a constant hub of activity: a continuous string of cars, fluctuating faces, and strangers’ shouts. It’s the boisterous backdrop to Holy Mountain’s No Hollywood, which was recorded in his old apartment, his car, and sporadic studio sessions with friends in an ultimately vagabond process. His debut album, the nine-track project features some of Mountain’s most vivid songwriting so far, unpacking themes of dystopia, memory, and fulfillment in personal ruminations. Its eclectic formation captures the essence of the project: an invitation to reconcile with your own fears and failures, a complex journey to shifting perspective.
Since releasing his EP Crisis Actor in 2019, musically, the Philadelphia native has been quiet. Life’s been busy: “A lot of my inconsistency in music has been because of how kind of crazy my life’s been. I left a long relationship, left a house that I lived in for a while and I was all over the place,” he tells me. No Hollywood was recorded in this more turbulent environment, disintegrated friendships leaving previous recordings inaccessible. “There’s just a lot of funny little barriers to [the album] that define it in a way,” he explains. “It’s not hard to find inspiration for things to write about, it’s just hard to have a place and a time to create it.”
“No Hollywood” opens the project. Just pestilence / No Wicca Phase no Springs Eternal, texts Adam Mcllwee (Wicca Phase Springs Eternal/ex-Tigers Jaw) after hearing Mountain’s initial demo — the exchange between friends later leading to the duo uniting on the darker title track. Its production is lucid; there’s an ambient ache that mirrors the song’s sentiment. No Hollywood alludes to the chase to a dream that never comes into fruition. “You spin like a ballerina when you get drunk / That’s my baby and I let her go” Mountain croons. Be it an ode to a lover or desire cut loose, he sketches the arc of a doomed passage. The tempo builds and Wicca Phase adds to the subdued trail of images: “My mind has started turning into sand / Literal my lusting for you has never been eclipsed.”
This second-person address reappears throughout No Holywood, serving as a meditation on private thoughts. “Every song held a smile for you” lapses into “There’s a place for you and me somewhere in my imagination” and “You’re the star of the movie.” In the final track, “Swinging at my Shadow,” this perspective shifts: language centres around first-person (“It’s my body and I’m in charge”) and it’s as if a sense of resolution has been achieved. “What I always loved as a kid is when you listen to an album front to back, it sort of takes you through different little rooms,” Mountain says. “I thought it was really fun to start dark and get a little hopeful. And, maybe get a little swag and get a little punk at the end.”
No Hollywood features a variety of producers—Dull, Hafsol, Fantasy Camp, 6houl, and Velvet Graves—but Holy Mountain also comes into his own. On No Hollywood, he demonstrates new skills, mixing and mastering. Unlike Crisis Actor, it features two songs entirely self-produced: “Portrait of the Artist in Hell” and “Love Speaking.” Holy Mountain sings atop a soothing fingerpicked figure — a contrast to the more desolate lyricism throughout (“I’m hanging by a thread”), reinforcing the intertwined binary of acceptance and failure. In “Love Speaking” he explores a darker serenade. “I feel like it’s a book closer in a way, a culmination of a lot of strange experiences and a sort of time in my life closing,” he says. “I feel like I put a piece of myself in that song specifically.”
Tethered by the hypnotic guitar melody flowing throughout the record, his thoughts skip around, fluctuating between macroscopic imagery to minute detail, stringing the listener into his abstract world. It’s a more cohesive body of work, with each producer building on the album’s structure while Holy Mountain showcases his more refined sound. No Hollywood ties together the strands of the artist’s discography, providing a more sleek introduction to the world of Holy Mountain in the hope that it will serve as a point of direction to listeners.
“There are no rules to making music; you can have a piece of music that’s as big as you want or as small as you want, you can be named Holy Mountain when there are five other people named Holy Mountain as long as you’re unique, and you’re you, and you commit,” he tells me. “If I’m making music it’s because there’s something inside that’s trying to get out. It’s not even a choice, it’s the way I feel and how I process my feelings — you can’t assign rules to that. So I hope what people are able to gather from No Hollywood is that you can live in your own world and do whatever you want and not be afraid to fail. Embrace failure; live in your own world.”
Listen to No Hollywood below.