Led by Shadwick Wilde, Quiet Hollers are an indie rock band from Louisville who have made their name producing a dark, vaguely apocalyptic brand of music that aims to shine a light on our strange times. Released in 2015, their self-titled album (which we covered briefly) was the archetypal example of the Quiet Hollers aesthetic, combining a variety of styles and influences and tying them together with Wilde’s eloquent yet bleak observations.
Many of their songs feature people alienated from a hostile world, their environments either antagonistic to the characters’ presence or else collapsing altogether, and dragging everything with them. This doomed dimension is supported (or accentuated) by wry observations on the banality of contemporary life, the narrator often finding his hopes and dreams to be disintegrating, illusions dispelled by an unkind and dissatifying reality.
2017’s follow up Amen Breaks continued this trend, looking back to the 70s as a parallel to the present moment, where conspiracy, corruption and violence permeated society in new ways. The record took a more experimental approach, drawing upon a greater degree of influences, and saw the band evolve their sound while maintaining the same spirit. As such, the lyrical nature of the tracks remained as important as ever, forgoing any sense of optimism or trite reassurance in favour of a more open-ended form of questioning, placing hope in the idea that merely asking the big cultural and existential questions is some substitute in lieu of any answers or comforts.
Quiet Hollers are back with a brand new single, ‘Addicted’, inspired by the opioid crisis currently gripping the US. While Wilde himself has lost a family member to fentanyl, the song casts its gaze wider than personal tragedy. In this way, Wilde and co. treat the epidemic as a symptom rather than a disease, the product of a wider cultural malaise that is tightly bound with the way society is set up in the twenty-first century.
Quiet Hollers are also currently on tour. Check their Facebook page for dates.