HOLDING ABSENCE RELEASE NEW SONG
Photo: Bethany Miller
Acclaimed South Wales alternative trio Holding Absence have officially heralded the dawn of their next musical era with the release of their breathtaking new single, ‘Lucid Love’. The track offers listeners an initial glimpse into their highly anticipated fourth studio album, Modern Life Is Lonely, which is set to be released on August 28th. This monumental release also marks the band's first record under their dynamic new global label partnership with the renowned Sumerian Records.
The brand new single represents a radical evolutionary leap for the group, seamlessly blending their signature emotional weight with vibrant, forward-thinking sonic palettes.
Speaking on the track's adventurous creative direction, frontman Lucas Woodland shares: “Lucid Love is our most extreme foray into hyperpop yet. We had an absolute blast experimenting with new sonic textures and ideas while working to marry them to the already existing HA sound, and we’re so pleased with the outcome.”
The track's thematic core explores the modern complexities of intimacy and distance, navigating the ethereal space where human connection and isolation collide. Lucas elaborates further on the narrative thread spinning through the single: “Lyrically, the song is about a long-distance relationship where the two of you can only meet in your dreams. I really leaned into that imagery, treating the dreamland almost as a portal between you. This song takes a newer, more candid and modern approach to lyrics than I’m used to, while still aiming for something timeless and relatable.”
At a specific crossroads in modern society where digital connection appears to be at its most hyper-visible and prominent, the individual human experience within that network feels profoundly stranded, detached, and isolated. Authentic art must act as a Mirror to this shifting reality rather than merely painting escapist possibilities. For Lucas Woodland, this cultural call to arms lined up flawlessly with the exact creative space that he and his bandmates found themselves occupying. Armed with their definitive fourth full-length offering, the trio have meticulously crafted a body of work that speaks directly to the seemingly universal, collective experience of loneliness gripping the world in 2026.
Serving as a deliberate conceptual reference, and in many ways a contemporary update on the societal fatigue documented by Blur’s seminal 1993 album Modern Life Is Rubbish, Holding Absence's Modern Life Is Lonely strives to capture the fragile essence of what it truly means to exist in a historical moment that is as complexly woven as it is heart-wrenchingly captive. The tracklist provides an deeply introspective look at the technological assets, digital routines, and societal practices that have quietly woven themselves into the fabric of our external everyday life—frequently integrated entirely against our collective will or completely under our noses. The resulting songs perfectly distill how it feels to live in an era where one can be so instantly connected to the globe, yet feel so sensationally desolate inside. Rather than chasing abstract timelessness, the band prioritized making a timely record that strives to offer up genuine solace to listeners just as much as it documents how wonderfully and sensationally bizarre life has become right now.
Reflecting on this profound shift in his lyrical perspective, Lucas comments: “This album was really the first time that I thought, ‘Let’s speak about the world that I live in, rather than the world that I am. It’s no longer like a therapy class; a bunch of strangers are no longer turning up to Existentials Anonymous. In theory, everyone knows me now; they’ve heard my journey, but I’m still struggling in this big, bad world. It doesn’t matter how much enlightenment you can find within yourself; the world is still a scary place right now.”
For the enigmatic frontman, this evolution represents a massive, necessary pivot in his overall artistic perspective, especially considering just how much of his own raw identity and bleeding heart has been poured directly into the vessel of Holding Absence over the course of the last decade. Through their celebrated initial trilogy of albums—consisting of 2019’s self-titled Holding Absence, 2021’s breakthrough The Greatest Mistake Of My Life, and 2023’s critically adored The Noble Art Of Self Destruction—the band successfully traveled the entire globe, shared legendary stages alongside their personal musical heroes, and carved out the exact sort of dedicated, passionate legacy that can only ever be achieved when an artist taps directly into a highly specific, undiluted strain of human emotion. However, in bringing the definitive curtain down on that highly successful initial chapter of their career, it became deeply imperative for the musicians to start channeling their creative output from an entirely different thematic source.
Consequently, instead of pushing these heavy emotional observations solely through his own personal diary entries, the band set out on a grander mission to craft an external, individualized entity who could fully embody these modern cultural experiences. This manifestation birthed Y4-BBO, a character who operates just as much as a visual mascot for the band as he does a physical, tangible manifestation of the overwhelming technological confusion that bolsters this current era. His unique existence and haunting presence allow the record to safely harbor a dual concept of sorts, with his own fictionalized story masterfully enveloped within the framework of these extraordinary songs. In a remarkable dedication to visual detail, the character's distinct helmet, which takes center stage on the album’s striking cover art, was custom-built by the exact same special effects team responsible for building the iconic Cybermen for the legendary television series Doctor Who.
A vast majority of this creative reinvention naturally extends into how Holding Absence structurally sounds across this entire record. In intentionally stepping back to thoroughly re-evaluate what this band actually represents at its core, the musicians realized that their identity was far less about simple sonic noise and fundamentally more about the weight of language. There is an absolute infinity of ways that they could be speaking to their audience, but up until this pivotal moment, they simply hadn't possessed the luxury of time or environmental space necessary to properly utilize them. Rather than safely stepping along the well-worn, comfortable paths of their own yesterday, Lucas—alongside visionary guitarist Scott Carey and foundational bassist Benjamin Elliot - strived to showcase just how vibrant, vast, and viscerally otherworldly their musical chemistry could truly become.
By deliberately pulling eclectic sonic influence from the chaotic, unapologetic boldness of modern hyperpop and matching it with the ethereal, tranquil melancholy of lo-fi textures - all while fiercely protecting the heavy post-hardcore grit that beats at their true heart - the band took inspiration from boundary-destroying contemporary artists like Julia Wolf and Paledusk. The final result is a record that stands as remarkably exploratory as it is unapologetically emphatic.
Instead of anchoring themselves to standard, linear songcraft, the trio spent endless hours in the studio actively chopping up and radically changing parts of songs, slowing down and heavily reverbing sections just as much as speeding up tempos and smashing contrasting movements violently together. Delicate, soft musical textures and gentle, pattering synths clash gleefully with massive, euphoric bursts of kinetic rock energy in ways that simultaneously feel beautifully familiar to long-time followers and unfathomably fresh to the broader alternative landscape.
On production duties for this monumental outing is the acclaimed Daniel Braunstein, marking a historic milestone as the very first British band the elite producer has ever worked with in his career. The partnership represents a masterful combination of two distinct heavyweights of the alternative scene operating completely outside the bounds of what is traditionally expected of them. At a time when alternative music is increasingly being consumed, packaged, and systematically manipulated by algorithms and cold technology, remembering the organic human importance of digging deeper into the artistic unknown has never been more crucial to survival.
Lucas opens up about the friction of creating in the modern digital climate, stating: “We pushed ourselves in ways that we’d never had before, while maintaining what that language of Holding Absence is. We’ll be introducing people to new sounds, and that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. But also, I think everything should inspire something, and with this record, as pretty famous victims of what AI is capable of, I wanted to do shit that no AI idiot would ever try and do, or even understand how to do. We’re at a new frontier where things are changing very fast, and we don’t know what this horrible sort of change entails for us. But where we are right now is essentially at a point of instinctive rebellion against that, and I’m intrigued about what comes next with that.”
This rebellious, expansive mindset naturally extended into the specific lyrical directions that Lucas chose to explore across the album's tracklist. In making a conscious attempt to look far beyond the internal processing happening strictly inside his own head and his own heart, the vocalist looked directly upward at the night skies, drawing inspiration from the unequivocal vastness, cold silence, and unlimited potential of outer space. The stars burning above our heads are undeniably beautiful, yet they remain deeply daunting to the human psyche; the ancient, lingering question of whether there is someone or something more than us out there remains drenched in just as much romantic wonder as it is existential terror.
There is a profound, constant duality to our shared human existence, and the record masterfully captures the steady pendulum swinging back and forth between two very different, but similarly critical, emotional points. As a species, we find ourselves surrounded by so much blinding hope, yet that biting sense of underlying loneliness remains just as close to everything we do. This exact, dramatic juxtaposition played an enormous role in shaping the overarching songwriting process from the ground up.
Because this album cycle represents the absolute longest amount of time that the band have ever dedicated to working on a single record across their entire career—spanning two and a half years of solid, uninterrupted writing, intense demoing, and meticulous studio crafting—it ultimately allowed Lucas the rare chance to flawlessly pinpoint and analyze every minute aspect of what it truly means to exist at this pivotal, turning-point moment in human history.
Reflecting on the grueling, transformative journey of the album's creation, Lucas shares:
“Over the last two and a half years, I’ve gone through so much internally in regards to hopelessness, loneliness and fear of failure, and I think this album really is like a resistance to that. There’s an awareness of self in here now. It’s almost cynical, but it is also realistic. I say this every time, but I truly mean it. This album could have just not happened. But I have such a deep yearning for this life and this art form of storytelling that I have to do it. I just can’t not.”
To find themselves a full decade into their collective musical journey and to still possess the ultimate respect for, and response to, that internal desire to keep on searching into the dark is something that does not come easily to bands in the modern landscape. It is this precise artistic integrity that cements Holding Absence as a group completely unlike any of their peers. With Modern Life Is Lonely, the band have brilliantly expanded upon every single element of what they once were, executing their vision in a manner that is as completely undeniable as it is utterly unstoppable.
Lucas muses in conclusion, looking toward the horizon:
“I think that we are now in the arc in our career where we could fall the hell off or we could cling on for dear life, and sort of dwindle and fade away. Yet, I think we’ve done neither of those things. I think that we’ve been as rebellious as we’ve been respectful of our band, and we’ve managed to hold that line. I’m not a kid anymore, and I don’t want just to be doing the same stuff over and over again. So, it’s really special to me that we’ve nailed something very unique that is bigger than our band. Bigger than all of us.”
