Prior to the release of Box for Buddy, Box for Star, the reeling discography of This Is Lorelei—multiple bodies of work released per year for the past decade, spanning nearly 11 hours in total—felt somewhat like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Most releases were bundled up in half-baked packaging, whether that be the autologically titled EP #31 (there’s also an EP #32 and EP #33), or with cover art that was quite possibly created on Mac Photobooth in under 30 seconds. The music itself suggests that the project was conceived as a carte blanche and somewhat anonymous canvas for Nate Amos’s personal music explorations. While the fruits of his labor in the art-pop outfit Water From Your Eyes are undoubtedly experimental, they are arguably eclipsed in terms of range by his work under This Is Lorelei, which can (and will) jump from insolent hyperpop Americana to quirked-up indie-pop within one 15-to-20-minute body of work.
In its entirety, Amos’s discography is a tousled buffet of instruments and pitch shifts, chock full of heart aches, financial slumps, and even the novel holiday song about cooking crystal meth. It’s a smorgasbord that can be approached however you want, one you can pluck songs from and create your own narrative with via a playlist on your streaming app of choice. Well, it was until Amos released Box for Buddy, Box for Star last year. That record was by far the most robust This Is Lorelei body of work yet, honing all the amusing strengths of the project and carving out a space where they could exist within a format that felt seamless. It’s an incredibly intentional album, though never in a way that imposes as tedious; rather, you may find yourself assuming he had to have been possessed by some higher power and spewed it out in one sitting. You would never believe there were 13 tracks also written for the project that were cut, all of which he shared between 2022 and 2024.
This Is Lorelei’s latest record, Holo Boy, exists as something of a prequel to his last record—consisting entirely of songs written in the years prior to Box for Buddy, Box for Star and its aforementioned 13 B-sides. Holo Boy features ten re-recorded tracks that were once artifacts in Amos’s prolific ouvré, only now they exist in a format that is significantly less subject to the whims of a listener. Amos has already proven himself an astute songwriter, but on Holo Boy he continues to pull the work of This Is Lorelei out of its once-amorphous territory, presenting us with yet another robust block of material that allows his idiosyncratic songwriting to truly shine.
Holo Boy commences on a similar note as Box for Buddy, Box for Star, luring you in with a soothing introductory song that feels like a kind of sonic stray. Instead of the twangy feel of “Angel’s Eye,” you get “I Can’t Fall,” a jazzy lullaby that sparks a vague sense of grogginess, one that will come back to meet you again and again throughout the record. This Is Lorelei is not the most suitable subject for lyrical deconstruction in an aggressively literal sense; while it would be a waste of time trying to decode his sentiments, there is certainly an impact to the tranquility that the album leads with, as well as the recurring mentions of sleep woven into the first three tracks. Lines like “Today is just tomorrow, and tomorrow’s just today, I will wash my dreams away” in and “You don’t want to know what my dreams are about” inch the record into the liminal space it operates from—one where timelines are distorted but the emotional sentiments buried within them are somehow entirely revived.
Holo Boy honors the incongruous and somewhat genre-immune nature of This Is Lorelei, but it feels as though Amos put the original tracks through some sort of creepy, corporate team-building activity that pushes some mantra along the lines of “you are only as strong as your weakest link.” By that I mean it’s evident that the structural flow of the record was considered heavily throughout the re-recording process. Listening to the initial releases in the order they appear on Holo Boy after you have heard their latest shape is relatively jarring; but it also highlights the ways in which Amos targeted cohesions to emphasize, allowing for diverse routes and sonic textures to comfortably coexist. He can somehow jump from the buoyant and kitschy “This Is a Joke” to the colder, almost industrial “Mouth Man” without prompting any auditory whiplash.
The tracks on Holo Boy vary in how much they resemble their first iterations, but the most prominent deviation across the record is that they are much more assured. They are built upon the same cunning foundations as their prior renditions, but it no longer seems as though Amos is treating his songwriting like a game of hot potato—as if he feared being scalded by holding on to a track for too long. On Holo Boy, the tracks feel finished and confident, allowing the record to serve as both the close of a chapter and an invigorating next step for This Is Lorelei.
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