The Holy Knives

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“I Guess It’s Enough” - The Holy Knives
Okay, how did they get Tarantino to direct this video? (Just kidding, but these visuals are gorgeous!) - Nylon

"...an enigmatic turn of gothic-psychedelic desert blues -- with noir-ish, echo-drenched guitars and a monster groove (Imagine The Cure as produced by David Lynch)." - BlackBook

We’re pleased to bring you the premiere of The Holy Knives’ music video for their song “Stray Dog” (watch it below). The track is taken from the band’s upcoming debut full-length Year of the Black Dog, which is scheduled to be released on November 2, 2018.

The band commented on the song:

The video for ‘Stray Dog’ is a surreal, tragicomic noir that follows the story of the roller-skating, dirty dancing dog detective McPooch, as he desperately searches for his missing wife. Shot in New Orleans, we feel this setting is a perfect visual for the oozing mystery that is the atmosphere of the song. Think of this song as the keyhole you can look through to glimpse the heart of our forthcoming album, ‘Year of the Black Dog.’ - New Noise Magazine

As the calendar year winds down, music fans, myself included, are being met with the last push of new record releases before the full-on winter months, in a final bid to make those “best of” lists. There are fewer album releases right now, but, as is generally the case, I’d suggest valuing quality over quantity anyway. And, last Friday, (November 9) was chock full of quality.

Dinosaur Jr. frontman and modern guitar virtuoso J. Mascis released his seventh(?) solo effort, “Elastic Days,” on the Sub Pop record label.

Laura Jane Grace, likely best known for her work fronting politico punkers Against Me!, made a major shift, perhaps sonically, by debuting a record for Chicago alt-country and Americana greats Bloodshot Records, with the help of backing band The Devouring Mothers.

Speaking of alt-country and Americana, Rhett Miller of the Old 97’s released another solo record, this time for ATO Records, with positive early press ahead of a couple advanced singles.

And, the preeminent funk and soul Daptone record label released a gut-wrenching posthumous album from soul crooner Charles Bradley.

These are by no means the only albums released last week, but a mere few to check out.

The record that has earned repeated listens from me is the self-released debut full-length from the The Holy Knives. Brothers Kyle (lead guitar and keys) and Kody (vocals and guitar) Valentine are joined by Julio Mena (drums) and Mauricio Vazquez (bass) on a 10-track album that followed their EP from the summer. Appropriately described by the members as “a band that infuses the sultry sounds of rock ‘n’ roll with a tinge of desert psychedelia,” “Year of the Black Dog” picks up perfectly where the aforementioned EP left off this summer. Latin Grammy-nominated producer Manuel Calderon recorded the album, adding textures and experimentation with various keys, organs, slide guitars, synth bass, and programming, making for a surrealistic, Western desert-inspired atmosphere and tone. The band sonically blends the roots of the Valentine’s hometown of New Orleans with their current locale, San Antonio, into a pastiche of addictive and effective indie noir.

“Year of the Black Dog” is available now as a CD and digital download, available from the band directly at theholyknives.com, or from their Bandcamp page at theholyknives.bandcamp.com/album/year-of-the-black-dog.

Recommended for fans of Timber Timbre, The Black Heart Proseccion, Spindrift, Morphine, and even moments of The Handsome Family. - DGO Mag

The Holy Knives released their colorful EP this spring and since have been working on bottling up the essence of the desert for their upcoming debut LP.

The brothers that make up The Holy Knives, Kody and Kyle Valentine, locked themselves up in a west Texas studio this summer between tours. There, in the Sonic Ranch, they worked with Latin Grammy-nominated producer Manuel Calderon to bring into the world Year of the Black Dog coming Nov. 2.

“What we created on this album is a time capsule of a sound we’ve been chasing all our lives, and we believe this is our truest artistic statement to date,” Kyle says. “However, we also think this record can be thought of as a guidepost for what’s to come in our future.”
Their first single off the album “I Guess It’s Enough,” premiering below, is an emotional song. They’ve paired it with a Twin Peaks and Tarantino-inspired music video that catapults you into the peculiar, yet romantic world the song creates. It features echoing guitars and vocals that play along to a melody harboring so much tragedy it can’t help but burst your heart into two.

“’I Guess It’s Enough’ is a desert song at its heart,” Kody tells BTRtoday. “We thought it was an angry or sad song [at first], but we believe now that this is really a love song—a love song praising the non-rational nature of love and submitting to its power.”

The duo admit that they’re huge Twin Peaks fans. The second Límite Norte Productions mentioned a David Lynch inspiration Kyle and Kody immediately hired them to produce the music video for “I Guess It’s Enough.” The video also has flashes of Tarantino inspirations with his notable feet shots, color schemes and text style. “The desert plus Tarantino equals our ideal writing conditions,” Kyle says.

In November The Holy Knives will tour Texas before heading out through the Eastern half of the U.S. in December—including 12/4 at Pianos and 12/5 in Brooklyn (venue TBD). In the meantime, get lost in the bizarre world of The Holy Knives below by reading the entire interview with the brothers and watching the music video for their newest single “I Guess It’s Enough.”

BTRtoday (BTR): It seems like being in Texas and your environment was important for your inspirations. How did your geography affect your sound?

Kody Valentine: Geography, and more broadly our place at the intersection of space and time, has a definite effect on the soundscapes we naturally gravitate toward. There is something about a place that affects us on a level that we don’t see or feel, but is undoubtedly present, which comes through in our songwriting.
A lot of the most strenuous molding of these songs happened in the deserts of west Texas near the border at a studio called Sonic Ranch. The atmosphere there was a visual mirror that definitely helped give shape to this record. We wanted to capture something of that environment, bottle it up, and refine it into a sound. “I Guess It’s Enough” is a desert song at its heart.

BTR: Tell me about this debut album you guys have been working so hard on. Was there a certain vibe you guys were going for?

Kyle Valentine: A lot of the songwriting and sounds came naturally to us—we tend to lean toward minor chords with a western soul. On the other hand, our producer, Comanche Sound, brought so many elements and ideas we wouldn’t have thought of on our own, so he played a large part in expanding the possibilities of our record. What we created on this album is a time capsule of a sound we’ve been chasing all our lives and we believe this is our truest artistic statement to date. However, we also think this record can be thought of as a guidepost for what’s to come in our future.

BTR: How do you guys usually write your music?

Kyle & Kody: We believe that 90 percent of everything [we write] is shit—because of that, we wrote around 100 song ideas for this 10-song album. As the adage goes, it’s 99 percent perspiration, one percent inspiration. When we’re in the thick of writing, we are in our rehearsal space every day, so our muse knows where to find us.
In an interview, David Lynch said that any time you have an idea you need to record it some way because otherwise it will be lost forever. Sometimes songs start with something as small as humming a melody into a voice memo or writing a random lyric down while grocery shopping, but most of the time they come from working on ideas non-stop. We believe in creating as many ideas as possible without questioning or doubting ourselves and sorting through the good and the bad later. Each song has a unique and definite spirit, and we are always looking for the ones that rattle our rib-cages.
BTR: This first single “I Guess It’s Enough” seems very emotional. What were the inspirations behind it?

Kody: In the early stages of our writing process our songs are like dreams. They are a flood of whatever hides in the deepest, darkest, most unexplored parts of our minds and hearts. We don’t question what happens until we already have an intuitive connection to the song. In other words, we lay the foundation for the song in a very free-flowing way until we realize that the spirit of the song is powerful and needs to be understood and explored.

The same process held true for “I Guess It’s Enough.” We loved the initial idea, which revolved around the chorus that you hear on the song, but we didn’t know what it meant until very late in the writing process. We thought it was an angry or sad song, but we believe now that this is really a love song—a love song praising the non-rational nature of love and submitting to its power.

BTR: I love the music video’s style, it’s very Kill Bill meets Twin Peaks. Tell me a little about it. Do you think it does a good job representing the song?

Kyle: We’ve been huge fans of Twin Peaks for a while and we religiously devoured the third season as it came out. After we sent the song to Límite Norte, they reached out about a concept that they had and began with the question, “Do you like Twin Peaks?” We knew immediately that whatever they were brewing up we would be behind, so we gave them full artistic license. We also appreciate the Kill Bill reference, because we actually watched a lot of Tarantino during the writing phase with The Comanche. The desert plus Tarantino equals our ideal writing conditions.

BTR: What kind of music are you guys currently really grooving to?
Kyle: It’s very hard to choose one, so we would have to equally give credit to Portishead and Leonard Cohen. We had been fans of Portishead’s Dummy for a long time, but during the writing of Year of the Black Dog we began to deeply explore their self-titled album. The deceptive simplicity and steady, shadowed mood they create was kind of an undercurrent, a subconscious, for what we were exploring in our music.

Kody: Leonard Cohen is one of the greatest songwriters to ever live. We’ve loved his music for a long time, but we connected on a deeper level to his music during this writing process. Songs like, “I’m Your Man,” “A Thousand Kisses Deep” and “Famous Blue Raincoat” were towers of songs in the melancholy, desert atmosphere we were going for. We think our whole lives as songwriters will be spent chasing the beauty and power of his music.

BTR: Other than the debut album, what else should we keep an eye out for in the future of The Holy Knives?

Kyle: The album comes out on Nov. 2, so before then we’ll be releasing at least two more music videos. Once the album is out, we’re going to be touring Texas and the northeast in November and December, then the west coast and the rest of the US in early 2019. And we’ve started writing the second album, so look out for that in the not-so-distant future. - BTRtoday

The Holy Knives, the duo of San Antonio brothers Kody and Kyle Valentine, are releasing their debut EP, Ritual Bloom, on May 11. The band has previously shared the single “To Be Me,” and today Treble is premiering the new video for next single “Every Day.” The track is a haunting mixture of Western gothic twang and moody synth-pop, with an equally eerie visual sensibility provided by DoubleScope Films.

The band provided a statement about the track: “‘Every Day’ is about the split nature of Self, the internal push and pull that creates a hurricane inside us whose eye is our soul. This song is an exploration of what it means to embrace these dueling forces within ourselves, and what effect that has on the people and the world around us.”

Watch The Holy Knives’ “Every Day” video below, and take a look at the band’s upcoming tour dates. - Treblezine

Released on the 5th as a standalone single Stray Dog, taken from the forthcoming album, encircles the listener, akin to the aural equivalence of freshly ground coffee beans, with a heady measure of warm woody, earthy layers of olfactory seduction that teases of temptations to come.

The evocative soundtrack layers multi-pivoted guitar, electronica with sliding percussion, expressive vocals and a shadowy polyphonic chorus to create a richness of layered texturing in to which the audience pleasurably reclines. - Emerging Indie Bands

San Antonio-via-New Orleans brothers, Kyle & Kody Valentine, aka The Holy Knives, release their debut EP, Ritual Bloom on May 11. Every Day is being teased ahead of this release and it’s a sultry, moody and tranquil four minutes of rock & roll with a tinge of desert psychedelia.

You can almost see the heat-haze rising over the chiming guitars, thrumming bass and Kody’s cool and slightly detached vocals. This atmosphere plays tricks with your mind, like desert Peyote, pulling you into their world of “duende”, a term drawn from Spanish surrealist poet Frederico Garcia Lorca.

Duende is spine-chilling art, something that rises from the depths of the soul and is born of the blood. It is something beyond logical comprehension that one feels deeply and understands intuitively. Lorca says the duende, “is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought…. a dark, mysterious force that exists but cannot be explained. As opposed to the muse, the duende is an inspirational spirit the artist has to battle every day in hand-to-hand combat.”

The Holy Knives took their name from a combination of two of their favourite works of art… the film The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky and the poetry book The Singing Knives by Frank Stanford. Both of these works share a fearlessness and a quest for truth through the irrational, as well as a flood of beautiful, thought-provoking imagery, that the brothers look to capture in their music. - Get Into This

The Holy Knives shared with us this infectiously catchy release, ‘Stray Dog’ couple weeks ago and if you haven’t checked it out yet, you definitely need to. The energy is exciting and we love the vocal effects throughout the track. This is quite possibly some of The Holy Knives best work to date, they brought a fresh style and perspective to the record that we can’t get enough of.

After several listens, we still find ourselves falling deeper and deeper in love with the details and the arrangement. In a world where mediocre often thrives, The Holy Knives are breaking down barriers and we can’t wait to see what the two have in store for us next. - Keep Walking Music