It’s good to have you back, Holy Fuck, and it’s a relief to say that the six year wait for Congrats is most definitely worth it. For all their weirdo mangled machine noise, it feels like they’ve reached a beautiful plateau - a perfect crossroads between all their disparate elements, finely tuned and full of vigour.
In dialling back the chaos a bit, the band have made room to let the smaller details of their dense and intricate music shine. It may have taken six years to deliver, but Congrats was worthy of the wait.
Congrats still sounds unmistakably like Holy Fuck, but their vision of weird electronic pop is much clearer here.
Congrats is most certainly an album given to emotional swings, it is mean and moody one moment and ridiculously blissed out the next. If not handled carefully, such sudden changes can be jarring and uncomfortable, but Holy Fuck have found a way to make everything hang together neatly.
all of the songs (minus one useless interlude) had at least something worth returning to as I played Congrats over and over again.
Congrats is the welcome return of a foursome of dudes that are still plenty proficient at creating crooked, cock-eyed, almost-club jams (“Acidic”) and piling on swirling effects and rhythms to a critical mass without ever sounding like they’re losing control (“Sabbatics”).
It’s a statement of versatility from a band whose limited success previously came from forerunning a very narrow, specialized sound.
There are contrasts all over this record, and the sequencing keeps things fluid and lively between low, funky brooders (“Shivering”), mid-tempo rock (“Xed Eyes”) and dreamers like “Neon Dad”.
Though some of the album’s second half wanes into abstraction, the dramatic arc of Congrats both begins and ends with enough strength to keep it from floundering.
Congrats isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself—the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on.
REVIEW #77: Congrats by Holy Fuck
Chimes Broken’s melody is primarily led by the bassline; I can’t tell whether it’s an actual bass guitar or if it’s synth bass instead, but it’s groovy nonetheless. It slowly transitions into a wailing static sound around the middle, before progressing into the second half where you eventually get these hollow vocals that provide an atmospheric ambience to the track. And it’s a really good opener, establishing the aesthetics ... read more
My Christ, what an album. Holy Fuck is a great electronic group, and this album is proof. Forcing fans to wait six years for your next project seldom results in quality but they did it. Look no further than the track Tom Tom (which, if you’ve seen Invincible, are already familiar with) to their perfection of the craft.
Holy Fuck, Holy Fuck!
1 | Chimes Broken 4:51 | |
2 | Tom Tom 3:47 | 84 |
3 | Shivering 4:21 | |
4 | Xed Eyes 3:54 | |
5 | Neon Dad 3:42 | |
6 | House of Glass 3:00 | |
7 | Sabbatics 3:24 | |
8 | Shimmering 0:58 | |
9 | Acidic 3:42 | |
10 | Caught Up 5:20 |