Last Monday I featured 3 artists from Iceland, so this week I’ll head to Sweden for 3 brand new indie releases, starting with a healthy dose of psychedelia from Stockholm project Holy Ship.
We haven’t featured them previously, but they’ve been around now for a couple of years, and actually it’s less of a studio ‘band’ anyway, but more simply based around the talents of multi-instrumentalist Jonatan Westh (formally of Blackstrap), supported by long time collaborator friend David Götestam on drums.
Originally releasing a debut single in 2018, he went onto release an EP entitled ‘Event Horizon’, which contained the 5 tracks he'd released over the 12 month period, played a few live shows as a ‘band’, before the restraints of Covid hit and a sparse 2020 followed. New single ‘Giant Step, Small Leap’ is the 1st track however from a new EP entitled ‘Les Deux’, and it’s an appealing mix of styles.
For sure there’s dreamy psychedelia at the heart of it, but the darker synths add a slightly different texture to it all, and it becomes intense and a little moody too. But it’s the pulsating rhythmic groove that carries the track along, and it won’t take you long to really get the feel for it. Very distinctive certainly.
Writing about the song Jonatan Westh says that 'Giant Step, Small Leap‘ is "a song about the manipulative games, observations and control people play when interacting with each other. It’s driving fuzzed out groove portrays a vibe of one being closely studied."