St. Louis-born, Los Angeles-based Leanna Kaiser started out as one half of ambient duo Frances With Wolves, before heading out west to pursue an education in filmmaking. There, she kept her finger on the pulse of the music scene by making music videos for a impressive cast of collaborators including Jessica Pratt, Allegra Krieger, Dean Wareham and Papercuts. Last year she unveiled a new creative project Holy Matter, an alias that allows her to gather threads of psych, folk, dream pop and experimental noise into a style that explores life’s ever-changing nature with an uncanny dream logic, where past and future marble into something strange and atmospheric.
Following a slew of singles, Royal Oakie Records have now released the debut Holy Matter album, Beauty Looking Back. Aptly named after a painting by 17th Century Japanese artist Hishikawa Moronobu, the album is unsurprisingly preoccupied with time and the impact of the past on the present moment, following the changing seasons of a life with equal doses of nostalgic longing and reassuring closure. “It seemed an appropriate title because this is a collection of backwards looks,” Kaiser explains. “A survey of emotions and moments, written between 2020 and 2023. I think a lot about the past, how a life is built up of all that came before it.”
Opener ‘Autumn’s Envy’ “occupies the liminal space between the real, emotional and spiritual,” as we described in a preview, “as though through loss and introspection, one can lead themselves towards uncanny places.” And the follow-up ‘Eve’s Hollywood’ is no less dreamy, drawing on the cinematic aspect of Kaiser’s parallel career to craft what we previously called “an immersive country-tinged dream pop croon worthy of a David Lynch set-piece.” But if that track was succinct, ‘Fallen Leaves’ pushes concision even further. A brief, ethereal snapshot of the most ephemeral of seasons, though one which lingers much like leaves persist upon the forest floor.
This willingness to offer compact, swift songs not only helps Holy Matter circumvent the more self-indulgent aspects of the dream pop genre, but also feels intrinsically linked to the themes and mood of the album. The songs cycle through as one might a collection of memories, each appearing fully formed and dissolving before we move onto the next. Be it the retro pop croon of tracks like ‘Wishing Well’ or ‘Prince Gloom’, or the hypnogogic and slightly surreal instrumental ‘Queen of Hearts’. ‘The Dove’ encapsulates the style perfectly, a brief yet elegant track which plays like something between a nursery rhyme and fable in all of its heightened longing. In my tower sewing / I can hear the doves’ song,” as Kaiser sings. “In their circle crowing / My love comes to me, anon.” Watch the video directed by Yun Chen below:
Final track, ‘Lore in Green and Blue’ was the first song Kaiser wrote for the record, a decision which on another record might seem like an odd one, but here seems perfectly fitting. Something of a companion piece to ‘Fallen Leaves’ it again looks back to a disconsolate period of anxiety and depression. She says it’s a song about “missing the green and blue hillsides of the Ozarks, thoughts on astrology, numbness and apathy, the whole kit and caboodle,” and this vulnerability is palpable. Both in the gentle, quiet folk of the majority and the swelling catharsis of the finale. “I wanted the last part to be a lot different and more bombastic,” Kaiser explains. “It’s like a final cry out. I wanted it to feel desperate and raw but also lead to something more resolved on the horizon.”
Beauty Looking Back is out now via Royal Oakie Records. Get it from the Holy Matter Bandcamp page. A physical release for those of us in the EU and UK will follow in early December.
