Three of the psych-rocker lads from Holy Wave, Julian Ruiz (drums), Joey Cook (guitar), and Kyle Hager (keyboards, guitars, vocals) were kind enough to sit down with me outside the Far Out Lounge at this year’s Austin Psych Fest not long after their as-usual fine set Friday night. We talked about their latest album, Five of Cups, working with Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, horror movies, ramen, and lyrics changing on the fly.
7th Level Music: Good set as always. Every time I’ve seen you guys, it just kills. The Studio 22 and B-Sides album just came out, which is great. Thanks for putting that out there. What are you working on now?
Julian Ruiz: That was about fifty percent new songs [during our set].
Joey Cook: We’ve got a new record coming out July 10th (i’m DADA).
Kyle Hager: Did you say you DJ at Notre Dame?
7LM: Yeah, I’ve been DJing there for twenty-plus years.
JC: I think that might have been the first we heard of us [being played] on college radio. [Would that have bee] when Relax came out (2014)?
7LM: Yes, since Relax.
JC: Yeah, we got an e-mail saying, “You guys are on this radio station,” and we were like, “What? There’s somebody at a college radio station playing us?”
7LM: Speaking of Relax, I’m a horror movie geek, so whose idea was it to put Nosferatu on the cover?
JR: That’s the one guy who’s not here (lead singer Ryan Fuson).
JC: Me and Andy (Julian) came up with the album title.
KH: That (image) was the counter to “relax,” I guess.
7LM: Was there any word about Frankie Goes to Hollywood jokes?
JC: That what it came from. We were playing a show at (downtown Austin venue) Cheer Up Charlies and I would see that [Frankie Goes to Hollywood] shirt that would just say “Relax” on it.
JR: I love those shirts.
JC: I thought, “We should call the album Relax.”
KH: It’s a good fuckin’ message though.
7LM: It is. You know, I was going to bring that up. Jumping ahead, the messages on Five of Cups are even more relevant now…Trying to stay positive in this environment.
KH: Yeah, it’s…it’s been a decade so far.
7LM: That’s a good way to put it…It’s been a decade for sure.
KH: We’re probably closer to what people experienced in the Forties or Sixties, at least in my lifetime.
JC: We thought Interloper was the sad state of affairs record, and we had no idea what was coming.
KH: We didn’t know how sad it was going to get. We recorded it in 2019 and put it out in July 2020. It was right after the pandemic, we released a new record and were like, “Fuck…”
JC: And we had momentum. We were touring a shit-ton, and we were just on our game and then it was like, “Okay…”
7LM: Was working with Lorelle Meets the Obsolete [on Five of Cups] something you’d tried to do for a while and it finally worked out?
JC: Yeah, we meant to record at their place in Ensenada (Mexico) in 2021 and I was working here at a food truck and I broke my finger and had to have surgery on it. We had all planned this trip to go record there and I had to not go because I had to have the surgery, but we finally made it out there last year and did a record with them.
KH: The new record has them on several tracks. Lorena (Quintanilla) sings one of the songs on it again (as she does on Five of Cups’ “The Darkest Timeline”).
7LM: Are there any other bands you’re hoping to work with?
JC: The guy who produced the new record is Joo Joo Ashworth. He played in a band called Froth.
JR: He produced and engineered the whole thing.
JC: We’ve been friends with him for a long time and always wanted to collaborate with him. We’ve always loved Froth and everything he touches. He was, even more than Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, more of a collaborator on the record. The tone of it, and stuff like that.
JR: It was a culmination of a plan we’d been trying to do for so long.
JC: It was such a bummer when I broke my finger. My doctor said, “You’re never playing guitar again.” He did a great job, though. I barely play now.
7LM: Are you doing any more touring soon?
JC: Yeah, this fall we’ll be doing tours. East coast, Europe, then west coast in the fall.
JR: We’ll be in Chicago [at the Empty Bottle] August 13th.
7LM: This is something I ask every band I interview: Do you have any favorite misheard versions of your song lyrics?
JC: We make our own versions.
KH: Ryan also changes the lyrics.
JC: He doesn’t remember his lyrics.
JR: Ryan always keeps everyone on their toes.
JC: We create alternate versions every single night.
KH: I don’t even remember what the chorus of “Western Playland” (from Freaks of Nuture) is, but I know that Ryan sings the way the Brazilian guys sing it. When we were in São Paulo, he was like, “Oh, that’s better.” He just sings what they came up with.
7LM: I asked Oliver Ackermann of A Place to Bury Strangers that, and he told me he loves when that happens because it means the song takes on a whole new meaning for each listener.
JR: Yeah, for sure, and I’m glad they’re listening to the lyrics.
7LM: Is there a way you choose who sings what? Kyle, is there a time when Ryan says, “You know what, you should sing this.” or vice-versa?
KH: Me and Ryan bring ideas to the table, but also, especially when Julian writes a song sometimes he already has a vocal idea and he sings it, but a lot of times either me or Ryan will gravitate towards singing.
JR: They’re the main singers, so when we have ideas we go to them.
KH: If one of us says, “Hey, I’ve got a vocal idea for this,” then we’ll start running with it.
JC: We would rather them sing.
KH: It happens pretty organically. It’s not like, “I’m singin’ this one!” It’s like, “I’ve got a cool idea. What do you guys think?”
JC: What instrument you play on the song is determined by who shows up first. Everyone wants to play the bass line first.
JR: I think Ryan really wants to be the drummer.
KH: We don’t switch [instruments] as much on stage much anymore. Half of the stuff that I’m playing, even from the old stuff, but especially from the new stuff, that’s not what I wrote on the song. The guitar parts on the new songs, its half stuff I wrote on guitar, half stuff somebody else wrote on guitar, plus what somebody else wrote on keyboard a little bit.
JC: Sometimes you have to hear your part being played by something or someone else. We have backing tracks with three of us playing guitar on the same song, and none of the keyboards get to be played, so you think, “Oh, there’s my keyboard part.”
7LM: You guys have so many psychedelic influences, but are there other outside ones? There are some songs where I think, “That’s almost a metal riff.” or there was some stuff you were putting down, Julian, that made me think, “That’s almost like krautrock.”
JR: Oh yeah.
JC: I think we’re all super into that krautrock stuff.
KH: Growing up in El Paso, everything was heavy music. That was the scene we all came up in. We all started off playing in hardcore and hardcore-adjacent bands.
[At this point, Alex Maas of The Black Angels stopped by to say hello, and, “I wasn’t able to see your set, but I heard several people said they laid down and closed their eyes, and just melted into the ground.” He also described Holy Wave’s sound as “an enchanted scroll” to his son.]
JR: It (“holy wave”) is a spell…
JC: There is a card in Digimon called “Holy Wave.”
7LM: Now I have to ask, are you guys gamers?
JC: Me and my wife play Mario Party a lot. We play FIFA a lot.
KH: Legend of Zelda is the only thing I really game hard with.
7LM: I run a D&D games almost every week with some buddies of mine. I once wrote a whole campaign based on The Sword’s Age of Winters album.
KH: Oh, that’s cool.
JC: The guitarist from The Sword, Kyle (Shutt), is a good friend of mine. He’s a coworker of mine. He’s a bad ass dude.
JR: A legend. Ryan’s super into board games.
KH: The guy who’s going on tour with us, Dylan, is the guy to talk to about D&D.
JC: He was having D&D parties during the pandemic.
7LM: I always like to ask this: I once heard an interview with Ray Charles in which he said he sometimes got bummed out because people only wanted to talk with him about music. So, is there stuff outside of music you guys are really interested in or are fascinated with?
JC: Food. In the van, it’s like a constant list of grocery items and food stylings.
KH: Geopolitical hypotheses.
JR: Kyle is like a history master. Everywhere we go, he tells us what’s going on.
7LM: Any particular part of history?
KH: I majored in anthropology and minored in history, so I wanted to be able to put things into a cultural perspective to help everybody respect the meaning of a place. Like, was it a river that led people to live here? Was it a railroad that ran through here? Why does this city exist? Why are there enough people here that some of them would come to a Holy Wave show? I like know that when I go to a place.
JC: Everyone kind of works in TV and film. We all do art department stuff.
KH: If anybody out there needs something…
JC: Holy Wave Art Department! We almost titled the next record Art Department.
JR: When we stay [with friends] in Phoenix, there’s usually a horror movie going on in the background. [Last time], it was Terrifier. Insane, dude. I’m kind of a scaredy cat, but that one was kind of light-hearted in a way.
KH: That one’s weird. It’s weird to think about what the crew was doing while they were filming. That’s what creepy to me.
JR: Yeah, someone’s just eating a slice of pizza. It’s like, “Oh God, lunch was supposed to me thirty minutes ago and he’s still going…”
JC: Last year, we all worked on an indie movie (Two Sleepy People), and I was the art director, and Justin was, too. Ryan was the production designer. We went and saw the movie in the theatre and we were putting all this stuff in there, so we were saying, “There’s Andy’s couch!”, and the main character, he’s looking in the fridge, and he closes the fridge, and there’s a picture of Kyle smoking a cigarette. You can Easter egg yourself into some shit.
7LM: The first or second Psych Fest I ever came to, my late wife and I ate at his ramen place where I was told some of you guys used to work.
JC: (the long-since closed) Daruma?
7LM: Yes! I miss that place. Our waiter asked us who we were excited to see and we told him, “Holy Wave.” He said, “Oh, man! A couple of those guys work here. They probably made that broth you’re eating.”
JR: I worked there for, like, seven years.
JC: Yeah, he was in the kitchen, and Eric, our bass player worked there.
KH: Joey kind of worked there.
JC: Yeah, I worked for the company. At one point, we all worked at a ramen shop. What’s crazy is that our new bass player who’s filling in for Eric after this show, he also worked there. He was a server there. He was our bass player before Eric.
7LM: So, where should we get ramen now?
JR: There’s a place right there (pointing across the street), Tatsu-ya.
KH: That’s where Ryan works.
JC: If you want that Daruma ramen, they have it at Komei. That’s more of a sushi spot.
7LM: When we came back and saw Daruma was closed, we were like, “Nooo!”
JR: It’s so good.
JC: Yeah, it’s the best one.
Keep your mind open.
[Thanks to Holy Wave and Cheyenne Doerr!]
