How Holy Wave Crossed a Border to Find the Album They Could Not Make at Home
Holy Wave i’m DADA. Recorded in Ensenada, trading haze for intention. The band’s most deliberate work. Reviewed.
Holy Wave have spent over a decade on the edges of Austin’s psych-rock scene, and on i’m DADA they sound less interested in floating away and more determined to shape the fog into something physical. The album was recorded at El Derrumbe studio in Ensenada, Mexico, run by experimental duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete. Half the band has roots in the El Paso border region, which made recording in Mexico less an escape and more a homecoming by proxy.
The ten tracks make more room for loops, samples, and hypnotic cyclical grooves than previous releases. The emotional core, honestly, formed in conversations about fatherhood, partnership, breakups, estrangement, and the queasy acceleration of AI. The lead single, titled with deliberate ungoogleability as “s33.u.in/HAL,” was one of the first ideas worked on and one of the last finished. Ryan Fuson described it as a prayer to the god of shortcomings, a child god the band is raising to one day be its saviour.
Joo Joo Ashworth, who mixed the album, helped crystallise the rhythmic language. The result is described as propulsive, candid, and the band’s most structurally deliberate work. Whether that deliberation carries across a full album of dream-pop aesthetics and microtonal experimentation remains to be heard.
The trajectory suggests Holy Wave found something in Ensenada that Austin could not provide, which is the distance needed to recognise a sound that had been forming among them for years.
