Few great artists stick to one lane when it comes to creating great work. So it’s no surprise that when I call rising star Haley Holgate to chat about her new music, she’s just finished working on a different type of creative project.
“I’m calling from my childhood home garage,” Holgate admits, giggling. Her voice down the phone line is as syrupy and sweet as the one in her songs, and her frequent laughs throughout our conversation sound sprinkled with the same sort of sugar. With the help of her mum, Holgate tells me, she has been making limited edition bookmarks to sell alongside the release of her sophomore single, indie-rock anthem Philosophers. “It’s a good excuse for me to get all arts and craftsy,” Holgate says.
Keep up with the latest music news, features, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
Be it arts and craftsy or singer-songwriter, Holgate’s creativity has always been bouncing between forms. “I was a little dance girl,” Holgate says, speaking to the catalyst of her music career. “It was through that I really connected with music and that sort of performance nature of it.” After high school, Holgate took this creative connection to the Australian Institute of Music to study vocal performance, working on and refining her sound to the one we hear belt its way all throughout her two first releases. “I feel really comfortable in my voice now,” she says.
It’s not hard to hear it – that comfort of Holgate’s that manifests itself into a supreme confidence of control over her vocal range and abilities. It’s right there in her first release, A Good Feminist, in the clean controlled voice that rises beautifully over the course of the song with the parallel build-up of the music. And on Philosophers, Holgate’s latest release, she puts it on full display in all its indie-rock glory.
A diaristic pop-rock ballad that interweaves vulnerable reflections of a false-start situationship with the pressure to understand the world as the philosophers once wrote about it, Philosophers proves yet another instance for Holgate to flex what she can do with her vocal cords. What begins as a quiet musing over a book she can’t get into, the track over time lifts and lifts as Holgate explains the breakdown of a relationship, only for the song to absolutely break open toward the end into the massive final chorus that gives her voice the space and sound to belt the lyrics with the emotion they’re loaded with.
“It was just so overwhelming,” Holgate says, reflecting on the relationship that inspired the song. You can hear it right there in the song, the overwhelmingness of it all. It’s in the painfully personal lyrics, in the sudden explosion of instruments, and, of course, in Holgate’s voice. The idea for the song, however, came to Holgate a few months after the relationship ended, when she was feeling a different type of overwhelmed. “I was reading this book, Homo Irrealis by Andre Aciman,” Holgate says, “And I was like, I actually can’t get through this.” That feeling of being out of her depth, of feeling overwhelmed, jolted Holgate right back to the feelings she had felt in that relationship. “I just connected the dots and the two different sort of scenarios interweaved into this song,” she says. “I put down my book and picked up my guitar instead. And the first line was, I’ve decided that book is beyond me.”
Whilst Holgate’s debut single balances a tongue-in-cheek witticism with serious undertones of feminism and selfhood, her sophomore single Philosophers is the track that reveals the poignantly written heartbreaking sincerity Holgate is so good at. Like reading a diary, listening to the lyrics Philosophers feels like a big stab in the guts that the emotional blast of the last chorus doubles down on, twisting the knife in the hands of pop music.
Working with Xavier Dunn on the production of Philosophers, Holgate knew she was in safe hands. “He’s such a gun,” she says of the ARIA-nominated producer. After writing the lyrics to the song, Holgate worked together with Dunn to create the sound of the track, using reference tracks – like Julia Jacklin’s Try Not to Let Go – as context points of what the music could be like in Philosophers. Along with Jacklin, Holgate points to artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Lizzy McAlpine and Holly Humberstone as musicians who’ve inspired her sound.
With a music video for Philosophers to be out to complement the track shortly, Holgate also teases another new single release in the next few months, alongside a single launch show. If her first two singles were anything to go by, Holgate is for sure a musician to keep on the lookout for, and cross fingers and toes she’ll be playing in Melbourne again soon.
Listen to Philosophers everywhere here.
This article was made in partnership with Haley Holgate.
