Holy Fuck
Holy Fuck formed in 2004. The group has explained that they took their attention-catching moniker from a common expression heard around Toronto, where they came together from a disparate cross-genre collection of bands. It would be just as plausible if they’d said the phrase simply indicated the reaction they hoped people would have to seeing them play or hearing their records.
To a significant extent, that has happened. The quartet has developed and continues to build on a signature sound that is driven by synthesizers, but is unabashedly alive — experimental electronic music fleshed out over the bones of a live rhythm section and eschewing now-common tools of live electronic performance like laptops and samplers. Co-founders and multi-instrumentalists Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh, bassist Matt McQuaid and drummer Matt Schulz have kept at it with remarkable consistency. New Holy Fuck records seem to arrive, like clockwork, every three or four years.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve likely heard their music before. The band’s percussive post-rock epic “They’re Going to Take My Thumbs” was immortalized in a tense scene from the first episode of Breaking Bad’s game-changing second season. Like peers who’ve also often had sync placements — such as Khruangbin, Tycho and Bonobo — the group has made it through leaner times thanks in part to countless film, commercial and even video-game musical cameos. If none of that rings a bell but Holy Fuck’s name does, perhaps you caught them on tour at some point with M.I.A., Wolf Parade, Foals or another Aughts notable.
Holy Fuck
Most impressive, though, is how loose and inspired Borcherdt, Walsh and company come off on their sixth and latest long-player Event Beat, released last month. They sound much more like a young, hungry band on the verge than a middle-aged one deep into its career. They’ll perform live this Saturday, April 18, in the main room at Eastside Bowl.
In its nascent period, Holy Fuck had company, sonically, with contemporaries sharing their rhythmic, creative dance-music slant while putting equal emphasis on atmospheric keyboard excursions as on guitar, bass and drum freakouts. Personal favorites of mine among that cadre include Sacramento’s !!! and Out Hud, NYC’s Battles, Ireland’s Twinkranes and Oaklanders-via-Minnesota Clipd Beaks. This was, and is, music you could tune into with your head, or just as easily tune out to with your feet.
These acts mostly either petered out or disbanded, yet Holy Fuck has proven itself to have the requisite stubbornness and confidence to cross the 20-year threshold. In early interviews, members pointed out that their defiant streak came in part from being underwhelmed by ’90s techno artists who made killer records but whose gigs felt akin to paying to watch a moving CD onstage. Today, it’s a welcome anachronism in a landscape littered with generative A.I. slop, where bands of human beings — especially electronic-music types — feel increasingly rare.
To record Event Beat, the band went to rural Nova Scotia — Borcherdt’s stomping grounds as a youngster — for the first time since their debut. The result is an assured, propulsive and quintessentially slippery 11-song collection. Try playing “spot the influence” and this LP will outsmart you. That said, over the course of Event Beat’s taut 40-minute runtime, I heard shades of Can’s ’72 psych classic Ege Bamyasi in the snaky rhythms and alluringly mysterious vocals of “Broken Roots.” “Elevate,” meanwhile, with its clanging guitars and house-music tempos, conjures U2’s oft-misunderstood Clinton-era Zooropa and Pop material. Best of all: centerpiece track “Gold Flakes,” a seamless marriage of post-punk tension and krautrock calm.
Could this album liberate Holy Fuck from the limbo status of being so consistently good they’re too often taken for granted? That’s unlikely. Still, a half-dozen LPs over 20-plus years — all of which can be put on at random and promise a solid listen start to finish, alone or with friends — is no small feat. I have a particular affinity for Event Beat’s 2020 predecessor Deleter, a hard-grooving, entrancing antidote to that year’s crushing bleakness. Where that record was the soundtrack for lockdown living-room dance parties, this is one deserving of being enjoyed collectively — cerebrally or viscerally, your choice — in person.
