Rival Sons Guitarist Scott Holiday Releases Single From Upcoming Solo Album

 

"Autonomatic" is the fuzz-drenched new single from Topology, the upcoming album from Rival Sons guitarist Scott Holiday’s solo project HOL1D4Y. “Autonomatic: It’s a word I came up with by combining the words: autonomy and automatic,” states Holiday. “Autonomatic: The built in or intrinsic desire for autonomy.”

“Autonomatic talks about our changing relationships with machines” states Holiday “How we might, at this point in history, use them to complete tasks and assist us with creativity. Maybe even help us socially, but especially with A.I, technology is progressing so rapidly it is so much more than a tool to finish an essay for us. If machines truly start to make decisions and “think”‘ for themselves…the natural progression could be that it will want to be like us in the deepest ways it can understand. We are free. We are autonomous. I think that this will be a natural evolution for a free thinking hyper intelligent entity. Autonomy. Built in autonomy. Hence the idea: they are Autonomatic.” Have a listen below.

Holiday's solo album Topology will be released September 25. Recorded and self-produced in his home studio, the album represents complete creative independence. The genesis of the project was partly shaped by a disastrous bike crash at the end of last year, when everything stopped. Just minutes from home, Holiday was struck by a car while riding his bike home after an evening with friends. He has no memory of the collision. The accident left him with six broken ribs, a shoulder injury, a head injury, and months of recovery. Unable to move but still thinking creatively, Holiday kept developing the unfinished pieces in his mind. A few compositions remained instrumental; but the rest started asking for lyrics.

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“What surprised me was that they stopped feeling like instrumental pieces,” Holiday says. “They seemed prepped for a story. Once I realized that, the words came quickly. That’s when I knew it was time to step into this new role — I needed to be the one to tell these stories.”

For the first time in his career, Holiday sings on his own recordings — less a reinvention than a part of his creative voice that hadn’t yet found the right project. Every aspect of the project was developed according to its own internal compass, free to become exactly what the music demanded.

This project has taken on a visual life of its own too, Topology occupies a space where psychedelic atmosphere, alternative music, progressive exploration and experimental pop intersect. How could Holiday not indulge his love of psychedelic imagery to match.

Check out the first single "Veridream" below.

 

“For this project the visual aesthetic is especially important to me. I want to evoke different feelings in the listener and viewer, and it’s so much more effective when there’s both elements (audio and visual) present. So every song on this album will have some degree of visual element to it. Colors and textures..people and places that evoke deeper feelings in us. Feelings that rest in the back of our minds and hearts through our ears and eyes.”

For more than three decades, Scott Holiday has built a career by following instinct. Before there was an album concept, or even the idea of a solo project, he started a new daily habit: wake up, get in the studio, pick up a guitar, with one rule — write something. Not a finished song, sometimes just a 45 second idea. Just a fragment, then set aside and picked up again the next day. The goal wasn’t productivity, it was momentum.

As the collection of sketches grew, Holiday noticed they weren’t isolated ideas — they shared a language, leaning into atmosphere, psychedelic experimentation, different textures and rhythms than he previously had worked with. The material felt personal enough that it resisted broad collaboration and asked to develop on its own terms.

Those early sketches were built around improvised drum recordings from longtime collaborator and Rival Sons drummer Michael Miley, sent from his home studio. Holiday treated them as raw material rather than finished tracks, cutting and reshaping the performances into the rhythmic foundation of each song.

Amid textural, fuzz-soaked, cinematic guitars, Topology is equally defined by lush vintage synthesizers and deeply pocketed drum grooves that anchor constantly shifting arrangements. There are echoes of the adventurous spirit of '70s progressive music, but the record feels equally informed by modern alternative production and a willingness to let mood, texture and movement take precedence over convention.

By the time five compositions had taken shape, Holiday realized he wasn’t writing toward another Rival Sons record — he was starting a new artistic identity: HOL1D4Y.