Holy Popes - Holy Popes (2023) Hi Res

Take a dab of Idles add a brush stroke of Girls In Synthesis then put the heart and mind of a modern day Joe Strummer or Emily Davison into the lyrics and Holy Popes might just about come into focus.

Musical abstraction that focuses your ears on both the lyrics and adds spice exactly where its needed are the thoughts that enter your head when initially crowd surfing this album, but when you actually go full on stage diving into it, the spice then becomes more of a whole herbal garden of interesting shit.

The prelude that greets you at the beginning did at first make me wonder if this was going to be another Celtic sounding band, oh how wrong that was!, ‘Seance’ took care of that bad thought, it slaps you with a bass sound that when you get further into this album is most definitely a huge driving force, along with the non tribal drum beat, which is so refreshing and adds to the whole ambiance of the album.

From the surface, this could be a very dire and bleak album, the sound is most certainly hard edged and gritty for a reason though, it serves to drive home the messages of oppression, anti racism, anti misogyny and bigotry, the quote that sits perfectly to explain this comes from Dom Knight “Let’s dance whilst we overthrow harmful systems.”, yet the softness is there, hidden maybe, or maybe just there for those who actually can hear it. ‘Medic’ does this, its a tale that I think is about someone who survives an event , but feels they shouldn’t have, a real hard emotional song that hits like a nail to the heart, yet somehow it comes out fighting.