Blackwater Holylight was formed in Portland, OR, but after the release of their third album, they pulled up stakes and moved down the coast to Los Angeles. The current lineup is vocalist-guitarist-bassist Sunny Faris, bassist-guitarist Mikayla Mayhew, and drummer Eliese Dorsay. On their new full-length Not Here Not Gone, out January 30 on vinyl, compact disc and digital via Suicide Squeeze, Sarah McKenna contributes synths and Camille Getz violin. The sound is heavy as it possesses an ethereal quality, hovering and roaring in a zone between shoegaze and stoner rock.
The three prior LPs by Blackwater Holylight, their eponymous debut (2018), Veils of Winter (2019) and Silence/Motion (2021), were all released by RidingEasy Records, the label responsible for the extensive Brown Acid series of compilations dedicated to ultra obscure hard rock bands, mostly domestic, a few from foreign shores, who existed and recorded from the late ’60s through to the early ’80s.
Blackwater Holylight’s sound wouldn’t fit on a Brown Acid volume, but they do lay down the sinewy scorch on their own records. In 2025, they added a four-song EP, “If You Only Knew,” to their discography through Suicide Squeeze, a new label as the band adjusted to life in a new city.
Not Here Not Gone’s opener “How Will You Feel” is appropriately echoey and thick with distortion as a synth glistens and glides atop the instrumental breaks. Faris’ vocals are urgent but atmospheric, and the track blends expansiveness and crunch with the confidence one would expect from a band with four albums under their belts.
The wall of distortion in “Involuntary Haze” begins as an intermittent injection only to morph into a continuous stream by song’s end. “Bodies” follows with a big 1990s-style thunder boot that’s finessed with a little shoegaze ambiance. True to its title, “Heavy, Why?” lays it on thick while managing to avoid the cliché rut.
With its guest beat by Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, the instrumental “Giraffe” is a stylistic departure that travels beyond shoegaze to a sound that flirts with the stranger side of trip-hop. It’s followed with “Spades” and its dense thud-pummel, the guitar crunch downright metallic in stretches (it’s worth noting that Blackwater Holywater contributed a cover of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates’ “Please Don’t Touch” to a tribute album to Motörhead, who’d covered the song with Girlschool in 1980).
“Void to Be” hangs in the neighborhood of beefy goth-rock spiced with a few almost NWOBHM guitar lines before laying on the crunch. “Fade” shifts gears into almost dream-pop territory before inevitably (though not predictably) dropping the hammer of heavy. “Mourning After” extends the band’s streak of avoiding triteness in their heavy dynamic, and “Poppyfields” begins in a tense post-punk mode before blasting forth with some sustained racket for the album’s close.
With another solid record in Not Here Not Gone, Blackwater Holylight is continuing to refine a sound that’s not overplayed in the contemporary scheme of things.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
