Høly River - Day is Born Album Review

I volunteered to share my reaction to Day is Born, the upcoming album by the band Høly River. They are in the process of collecting early reactions from friends to use for online promotion. Since this promotion will happen through social media, I feel pressure to try to sum up my experiences of this album in a paragraph or two. However, I am finding that trying to distill my reactions into a perfect bite-sized chunk feels completely impossible. I find that the depth of feeling I have for Høly River and their album just can’t be expressed as a tiny splinter of a soundbite.

I’ve had the great fortune and honor to be on a personal journey with the music and the people of Høly River for the past 15 years or so. Every fall or late winter for these long years, Laney and Jameson have passed through my home of Gainesville, Florida and shared their deeply sincere and true spirits via their music and through their company. For years I enjoyed simply listening to their CDs in my car on repeat. Their recordings would never leave my car. Over time, I started sharing the stage with them playing in supporting acts. At this point, we started developing a relationship as musical peers. I am grateful to share that their encouragement and support for my projects has fueled my own passion and confidence in my own music.

Finally, as of the last few 2 or 3 years, we started sharing the stage with me trying to perform on my cello my best impression of their violinist collaborator Jessika Blanks. I remember being asked spontaneously to join them on stage at the Riverine Reunion festival and being completely and tearfully overwhelmed when I found myself sitting in the midst of the spell that they are able to cast through their music. I’ve spent hours listening to their songs on repeat to get at the core of the power and message of their songs and serve them in the best way I can.

Right now, I am about a month out from recovering from surgery. Recovery has been harder than I or my surgeon anticipated and I currently can only walk for about 15 minutes at a time. I am too medicated to safely drive anywhere. These events cap a year that has been profoundly and completely draining and debilitating. It started with the anxiety-wracked lead-up to my father’s death. Then, it delivered me into the psychedelic spiritual unmooring of grief that followed. A grief that I found myself having to navigate in the midst of a progressively degenerating back injury. The injury led me to brave the gamble of spinal fusion surgery. Now I am on the other end of that surgery and not healing fast enough, according to my surgeon. I know how to ask for help, and loving friends and family hear my cries and also offer their own help. But it’s still absolutely a trial. Darkness opening to darkness and descending to further darkness.

In the midst of this uncertain recovery I learned that Høly River was imminently releasing an album that has been the labor of many years. An album that they forged in the midst of what I sense are seemingly impossible challenges and transformations on their end. Enough preamble. Let’s get to the review.

More so than any other band I know, Høly River’s music evokes the experience of being in nature. All aspects of nature. The promise of early dawn. The soaring heartbreak of a sunset. Being made to feel small and insignificant but feeling tremendous comfort in that. Their first track, Horizon, helps to carry me by granting me a much-needed desire to endure. The song channels nature for me in a way that blesses me with a comforting sense of power. A sense that some kind of good will come despite all odds. That this good, in actuality, is as inevitable as the tides.

I smiled the moment I heard Jessika’s violin trills on Healers and the Storm. I’ve tried to emulate her precise articulation many times over the years. When I hear Jameson’s bass drum enter, the tremendous depth of that sound makes me visualize shafts of light penetrating the darkest regions of the ocean. Laney sings of grief in this song in a way that I can deeply relate to. My interpretation of her refrain, “We are the healers and the storm” touches on a mystery that I contemplate often. We who wreck and ruin are the ones who must rebuild and restore. How the fuck are we supposed to navigate that? I know that personally, I have no choice.

If you are a fan of the string arrangements in Høly River’s music, Thunder is going to top your list, easily. The melody is absolutely jaw-dropping. There is a current of optimism and a promise of joy in both the melody and in Laney’s singing that made me burst into tears the moment I first heard it.

The song Can you see it? tickles my analytical musician’s brain in the best way. I dig the way the song starts with and returns to pounding, layered percussion. I am awed by the choir that Laney is able to create of her voice. There are so many moments where many delicate elements combine to support the lyrics in a precise and perfect way. I dig the barely-there overdriven guitar and the build-up to huge layers of harmonium supporting the climax of the song. I know that Høly River have worked super hard on this album and the intricacy of this song alone easily reveals the depth of their commitment.

One of the aspects that I most appreciate about Laney and Jameson is the way that they express their values through both their music and also the way that they show up in community. If you’ve been fans of their music or been to their shows, you know that they have dedicated tremendous energy toward protecting the waters and land in their home state of Virginia and the broader Appalachia. Electric Pulse is a song of warning. A reminder that our lifestyle is fueled by consumption, disruption, and destruction of the very land that supports life itself. I know that I personally need to hear this message time and time again.

Dropping into the intimacy of Eclipse Moon feels really sweet. We get to hear Jameson’s voice over the simplicity and honesty of a strummed guitar. Jameson quietly invites the listener to wonder if every living thing dreams. I love dropping into this dark little hollow of a song in the midst of the lush and soaring soundscapes of the rest of the album.

When I listen to Beneath the Fire, I am reminded of my personal relationship to war. I am anchored to war at an almost cellular level through my father and his family. My dad was born in a basement in 1943 in the German city of Bremen, a city that was obliterated by allied bombing during World War II. His aunt remembers fleeing the advance of Russian troops on foot carrying whatever belongings they could. I have spent my whole life hearing of wars unfolding everywhere. Both Gulf wars. Rwanda. Bosnia. Kosovo. Afghanistan. The eternal strife and brutal carnage in my home country of Colombia. The war that the USA perpetually wages against minorities and the poor. I thought that I understood what it meant to be a compassionate person who understood the impact of war until Russia invaded Ukraine. I discovered a part of my spirit that had never healed and that this tender aspect of myself was wounded anew. This wound revealed to me my family’s deep multi-generational trauma. It helps me to more fully understand the pain of others touched by war. My sense is that Høly River’s song asks if there will ever be relief and a peaceful sunset for those born into the fires of war. I can only hope that there will be.

Where I am at in my life I need to hear invitations to expect change even when that change seems impossible. To persist even when suffering and pain has blinded me to the possibility of anything else. The song Steady provides me with just that. It reminds me that change is inevitable and that that change can look like finally starting to experience the miracle of healing or finally starting to move through impossibly heavy grief.

Jessika’s lush, dark, lowest register weaves through the beginning Jo Bird. What I presume are her string arrangements dip under and lift up the song along its gorgeous and heartbreaking course. Since I started writing this, Laney shared the origin and meaning of this song with me, but I want to share my initial reactions. When I first listened to it, I could only think of the wonder and fragility of a romantic partnership, the unsurpassable terrors and blessings of being a parent, and of somehow learning to carry on and find strength after being stranded by the death of a parent. Tears. So many tears. This song is one that I will be returning to time and again.

The title track reminds me that the mystery and power of nature that can fill me with such awe is present even within me. I need music like the music of Høly River to bring me back to this truth. On January 2nd, 2026, this album will be released for all to listen to. I hope that you will get a chance to listen and be moved as I have been moved.