BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT: LIGHT DRAGGED THROUGH DARK WATER. A Career Retrospective By Mark J.

BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT: LIGHT DRAGGED THROUGH DARK WATER

📸: @caseychumbleyphotography

A Career Retrospective By Mark J.

Allison "Sunny" Faris formed Blackwater Holylight in Portland in 2016 following the dissolution of a previous project, gathering musicians around an idea rather than a sound — fully female-fronted from the start, built on the premise that heavy music didn't need to borrow its authority from the same places it always had. The lineup solidified around Faris on vocals, guitar, and bass; Laura Hopkins; Catherine "Cat" Hoch; and Sarah McKenna on synths. Portland was the right city for it: a scene that had always made room for work, sitting at the junction of psych, doom, and the experimental, where a band could take their time finding out what they were.

The self-titled debut, released April 6, 2018, on RidingEasy Records, made an immediate case. Recorded at The Greenhouse and GoldBrick Studios with producer Cameron Spies, it opened with "Willow" and moved through eight tracks that borrowed from Chelsea Wolfe's spectral goth, Sonic Youth's art rock/noise wigouts and Sabbath's low-end theology as much as from a softer lineage — the trailing guitar lines and reverb washes of Galaxie 500, the narcotic float of Spiritualized, the kind of dream-pop atmosphere that doesn't announce itself as heavy but earns the weight regardless. Songs moved as organisms rather than structures — verse-chorus formats dissolved in favour of something more liquid, more responsive to where the feeling was actually going. "Sunrise" and "Babies" hit like dreams you couldn't shake. None of it sounded like a band finding its feet. It sounded like a band that had already decided what it didn't want to be — heavy music as posture, riffs as machismo — and built outward from there. The record accumulated an audience the way the best debut albums do: slowly, then all at once.

Veils of Winter arrived in 2019 and pushed further into the desert-doom and bluesy heavy rock that had always been part of the palette — "Motorcycle" sits comfortably in the lineage of fuzz worship, Sabbath's hand on the wheel, the album at its most overtly indebted to seventies hard rock. But even here, the dream-pop undertow never disappeared; it just sat lower in the mix, waiting. Engineer Dylan White's production was denser, the tones murkier. In hindsight, this is the record that reveals exactly where the tension was building — a band capable of going full classic-doom homage but visibly itching to let the other half of their record collection back into the room. Nothing on it is throwaway, but it's the sound of a band mid-transition, working out which direction the pull was stronger. And unequivocally, "Lullaby" and "Moonlight" are enchanting closing tracks, taking the listener into a state of deep space with crafty, melancholic harmonies.

Silence/Motion in October 2021 is where that tension resolved itself by exploding. Recorded at Odessa Recording Studio in Portland as a four-piece — Faris, McKenna on synths, Mikayla Mayhew on guitar and bass, and drummer Eliese Dorsay — it was their first time working with a producer outside the band, bringing in A.L.N. of Mizmor and Hell. The choice made sense: someone who understood the weight they were carrying and wasn't going to flinch from it. The album opens with nearly a minute of interwoven single-note guitar lines over a low drone, closer to Pink Floyd's Echoes than anything in the doom canon, before the record commits to its real subject — Faris has spoken about the writing process coinciding with profound personal trauma and a period of collective grief, and Silence/Motion carries that not as a mood overlay but as the actual architecture of the songs. "Delusional," the opener proper, features Bryan Funck of Thou delivering a contrasting growl beneath Faris's ethereal vocal — light and dark made literal, stripped of any pretence. Mike Paparo of Inter Arma and A.L.N. himself appear on the closer "Every Corner." None of these guest spots read as features bolted on for clout. The band has talked openly about how heavily Sumac, Thou, Mizmor and Inter Arma fed into the songwriting itself — not just as friends who showed up to sing, but as a circle of bands whose work ethic and refusal to compromise gave Blackwater Holylight something to measure themselves against. "Around You " is as ethereal and harmonically perfect as the finest work by The Breeders, Cocteau Twins, etc.  The album took them out with Monolord in Europe and All Them Witches in North America, and by the time of that run, the band had fully arrived at a sound that was theirs alone — heavy enough to share a bill with extreme metal acts, melodic enough that the shoegaze and dream-pop roots were never buried.

The 2025 EP If You Only Knew functioned as recalibration rather than a holding pattern — a tighter, smaller-scale release that took the two poles Silence/Motion had pulled apart (the crystalline, MBV-and-Slowdive haze on one side; the totalitarian, Sumac-adjacent weight on the other) and worked at fusing them properly rather than letting them sit in adjacent songs. It's a transitional document in the best sense: not a lesser record, but one clearly building toward something with more architecture.

Not Here Not Gone dropped January 30, 2026, on Suicide Squeeze Records — the label change itself a signal — and it's the record where everything converges. Recorded at Sonic Ranch outside El Paso, Texas, with producer Sonny Diperri, whose credits run through Narrow Head, DIIV, and Emma Ruth Rundle, it arrived after the band's relocation from Portland to Los Angeles. That move shaped the record without redirecting it — the Pacific Northwest gloom came south with them, worn into warmer weather like something inseparable from the skin. This is the album where the shoegaze inheritance is finally given equal billing with the doom — the chorus-drenched guitars. Reverb trails are pure My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, the vocal melodies carry an early Cure and goth-pop sensibility that's been present since the debut. However, never this foregrounded, while the rhythm section and low end still answer to Sabbath, and there's a queasy, downer Alice in Chains heaviness in the more grinding passages. None of it reads as pastiche. It's a band that has spent a decade absorbing both ends of that record collection, finally letting the two halves run the whole show simultaneously — thunderous bass and distorted guitar tracking right alongside chorus pedals and electronic texture, Faris's voice doing the work of making the whole thing feel less like a genre exercise and more like a mood you don't want to leave. Midway through, Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio contributes a distorted techno beat to one track — arriving like a transmission from somewhere else entirely, and somehow not breaking the spell. Camille Getz's violin threads through the record with an elegance heavy music rarely allows itself. "Heavy, Why?" distils the whole arc into a single question and then answers it — or refuses to, which amounts to the same thing — while "Bodies" and "Spades" take the sludgy psychedelic end of the band's sound and sculpt it into something that feels genuinely transcendental rather than just loud.

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/petertroest/

The album's rollout has matched its ambition. Roadburn 2026 gave the band a slot performing Not Here Not Gone in full before most audiences had lived with it — a rare vote of confidence from a festival that doesn't hand out full-album sets lightly, on a bill stacked with Inter Arma, Primitive Man, and Krallice. The accompanying touring has run through US dates, a European leg taking in Desertfest Oslo, London and Berlin, A Colossal Weekend in Copenhagen, and festival stops in Brussels and Helsinki — alongside a North American run with Amenra and Primitive Man, and dates with Elder later in the year. Look at the company: Amenra, Primitive Man, Sumac, Inter Arma, Mizmor, Thou, Elder. Ten years in, Blackwater Holylight share stages with the heaviest and most uncompromising bands in the underground and sound completely at home doing so, while still fundamentally being a band capable of writing a chorus that wouldn't sound out of place on a Slowdive record.

Photo by @magdawosinskastudio

That's the arc that lands them in Melbourne this year — a band that started as four friends building a space where nobody could tell them how heavy music was supposed to sound, and ten years and four albums later have arrived at a record that finally lets every one of their influences speak at full volume at the same time, on a stage shared with bands they call friends, playing to a room that's about to find out what all of that sounds like in person.

https://linktr.ee/Blackwaterholylight

Go see them live, and buy all their releases, because all are exquisite masterpieces, which, like all masterful records, come more alive with each listen.

https://www.birdsrobe.com/shows

MUCH LOVE AND THANKS FOR BIRD'S ROBE FOR MAKING THIS HAPPEN!!!

 All shows and releases cited as of June 2026.