- Double Double Whammy
- 2025
Nate Amos might be an actual genius.
The NYC-based musician has been humbly but voluminously demonstrating his talents for years, piling up records across a range of aliases for some of the best labels in independent music. He partnered with Rachel Brown to make deadpan mad-scientist avant-pop in Water From Your Eyes and ended up signing to Matador. While that band was ascending, he teamed with Lily Konigsberg to cook up slightly more straightforward genre-morphing gems as My Idea, whose one album dropped on the Sub Pop subsidiary Hardly Art. As a solo artist, Amos spent a decade accumulating dozens of releases under the name This Is Lorelei before signing to Double Double Whammy for last year's stellar not-really-a-debut, Box For Buddy, Box For Star.
He's prolific, but the appeal is less about the amount of music and more about the breadth of it. Across all his endeavors, Amos has effortlessly skipped across stylistic traditions or jammed them together in surprising ways, like Beck if he were an earnest millennial with a frumpy, dejected personal affect. His lyrics are often depressing — "A loser never wins/ And I'm a loser, always been," he intones on last year's masterstroke "Dancing In The Club," which appears right after a brisk little number called "I'm All Fucked Up" — but what shines through most in his music is the joy of creation. You can hear so many ideas flying around in these tracks, and you can just as readily hear the work that went into assembling those quirks and what-ifs into masterfully crafted pop songs. There are so many giddy little surprises, but nothing feels out of place.
Holo Boy, out Friday, could be understood as a portfolio presenting This Is Lorelei's accomplishments so far. Like Car Seat Headrest's Teens Of Style, it's a collection of songs first included on various Bandcamp releases, now re-recorded and recontextualized for Amos' expanding audience: a best-of compilation that doubles as a brand new This Is Lorelei LP. There aren't a lot of common threads between these songs — the first one sounds like Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely," the last one sounds like Pavement's "Grounded" — but because they've been repurposed all at once, and because Amos' albums tend to cohere around his personal essence rather than a particular sound, it hangs together just as well as the ostensibly more consistent Box For Buddy, Box For Star.
Amos, who estimates he worked on 250 recording projects during his four-year stint in Chicago in the mid-2010s, could thrive as a strictly behind-the-scenes figure if he wanted to, a weirdo Jack Antonoff. A lot of artists would pay good money to sing over the kinds of wild concoctions heard on this year's Water From Your Eyes album It's A Beautiful Place ("Life Signs" sounds like surf-rock and nu-metal getting in a fight and falling down the stairs, but it also made perfect sense as a lead single). Like the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, whose droll baritone echoes palpably in Amos' own vocals, his tunes often sound magical when sung by other people — a distinctive voice writing for multiple voices.
When I briefly met Amos at Primavera Sound in Barcelona this year, he told me "Dancing In The Club" arose from an attempt to write a song that could be covered by other artists, a premise MJ Lenderman realized so brilliantly for this year's deluxe edition of Box For Buddy. Yet the original "Dancing In The Club" was a masterpiece in its own right, one that makes me happy Amos has stepped further into the spotlight rather than retreating into the background. Few people can so effectively funnel their heartbreak into lyrics and hooks, but even fewer would perform that material with the softened resignation Amos brings to every line, and only one would think to turn such a lament into an Auto-Tuned electro-pop pastiche of blink-182's "What's My Age Again."
Holo Boy is full of those kinds of epiphanies. So often, instrumental riffs flurry through the mix like piles of leaves caught up in a gust of wind, rising and falling at off-kilter angles as if guided by a twisted reimagining of Max Martin's melodic math. Who knows which one will snag you: maybe the bendy harmonized guitar lead that snakes through the Cars-meet-Strokes new wave rocker "But You Just Woke Me Up," maybe the video-game-esque keyboard lines that seem to be triggered by the drum and guitar blasts in "Mouth Man." Perhaps it will be the fingerstyle acoustic guitar that shoots through "My Friend 2" or the twangy chords and skywritten riffs that soar over the insistent drum machine on "Dreams Away." As on Box For Buddy, there are so many little details that might make you crack a smile or even take your breath away.
Amos narrates those songs with a guilelessness that cuts against his musical cunning, often playing the part of the down-in-the-dumps dirtbag with a heart of gold. "I'm the stain on your T-shirt/ You're my son, and I steal all the drugs you love," he sings on "Mouth Man," an explosive refracted rocker that reminds me of Cake or (if you'll excuse the Remembering of Some Guys) Enon's High Society. After adopting a sardonic posture in "Name The Band," he defaults to a tender refrain: "I don't wanna mess you up like that." He doesn't just construct these songs, he inhabits them, often with a sadness that haunts even the fleeting moments of bliss. For a guy who often plays the part of a fuck-up on record, his performances convey an impressive emotional intelligence.
Holo Boy is proof that he's been doing it for a long time. But I don't get the sense that he needed to resurrect these oldies to keep his winning streak intact, as if we're catching him on the downturn of a fertile creative stretch. These new recordings aren't just rendering his old songs in higher fidelity; many of them have been revised and revamped, and they benefit immeasurably from his expanded expertise. The verve and inventiveness he brings to these tracks suggests he'll still be making impeccably strange bespoke indie-pop for years to come. Until then, this album is a great chance to catch up on the lightbulb moments many This Is Lorelei fans missed the first time around.
Holo Boy is out 12/12 on Double Double Whammy. Pre-order it here.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Nas & DJ Premier's Light-Years
• 21 Savage's What Happened To The Streets?
• HEALTH's Conflict DLC
• Juliana Hatfield's Lightning Might Strike
• Conway The Machine's You Can't Kill God With Bullets
• Bryan Adams & Friends' A Great Big Holiday Jam
• Matt Kivel's Escape From L.A.
• Kramer's ...and the crimson moon whispers goodbye
• Pebe Sebert's Pebe Sebert
• Singer.Mattress.Cat's Subtropical Personality
• Arlie's SOMEONE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN
• Blue Tomorrows' Weather Forever
• SALIMATA's The Happening
• Blood Cultures' Skate Story: Vol I
• Volumes' Mirror Touch
• Caitlin & Brent's Caitlin & Brent
• Begging Dog's DEMO 1
• Hollyy's The Weight Of This Heart
• Fattmack's MCKENZIE
• Taeyeon's Panorama: The Best Of Taeyeon
• Fat White Family's Konk If You're Lonely: Fat White Family Live At Konk Studios
• Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here 50
• Blur's The Great Escape (30th Anniversary Edition)
• Gary Numan's Telekon (Deluxe Expanded Edition)
• Babyshambles' Down In Albion (20th Anniversary Edition)
• Snowbird's moon (10th Anniversary Deluxe)
• Hercules & Love Affair's Someone Else Is Calling EP
• Private Hell's To Dust You Shall Return EP
• Dorothy's Sea Songs EP
• VRSTY's Cloud City (Archives) EP
• Chewing Quintet's Quintet (Live In Los Angeles) EP
• Chris Patrick's Pray 4 Me EP
• Second Harbour's Coalesce EP
• Ben Klock & Fadi Mohem's LAYER ONE REMIXES EP
• Dopplereffekt's Metasymmetry EP
