Scott Holiday is a singer/songwriter and guitarist, best known for his work with rock outfit Rival Sons. For more than three decades, Holiday has built a career by following his instincts. Before the idea of a solo project or even an album concept, he started a new daily habit: wake up, get in the studio, pick up a guitar, with one rule — write something. It didn’t need to be a finished song, it could be a just a 45 second idea. Just a fragment that could be set aside and picked up again the next day. The goal wasn’t productivity; it was momentum.
As the collection of ideas and sketches gradually grew, Holiday noticed that they weren’t isolated ideas — they shared a language, leaning into atmosphere, psychedelic-fueled experimentation and featured different textures and rhythms than he previously had worked with. To him, what he was working on felt personal enough that it resisted broad collaboration and asked to be developed on its own terms.
Those early sketches were built around improvised drum recordings from longtime collaborator and Rival Sons bandmate Michael Miley sent from his home studio. Holiday treated the drum recordings as raw material rather than finished tracks, cutting and reshaping the tracks into the rhythmic foundation of each developing song.
By the time five compositions had fully taken shape, Holiday realized that he wasn’t writing another Rival Sons record, he was starting a new solo project, HOL1D4Y. The Rival Sons guitarist’s solo project’s full-length debut, Topology is slated for a September 25, 2026 release through Sacred Tongue Recordings.
Self-produced and recorded in his home studio, Topology represents complete creative independence. As it turns out, some of the genesis of the project was partly shaped by a disastrous bike crash at the end of last year that forced everything to stop: Just a few minutes from his home, Holiday was struck by a car while riding his bike home after an evening with friends. He has no memory of the collision. But the accident resulted in six broke ribs, a shoulder injury a head injury and several months of recovery. Unable to move, but still thinking creatively, Holiday kept developing unfinished pieces in his mind. A few compositions remained instrumental but the rest felt like they were asking for lyrics.
“What surprised me was that they stopped feeling like instrumental pieces,” Holiday says. “They seemed prepped for a story. Once I realized that, the words came quickly. That’s when I knew it was time to step into this new role — I needed to be the one to tell these stories.” And for the first time in his career, Holiday is a lead vocalist. For him, it’s less a reinvention than a part of his creative voice that just hadn’t found the right project and the right time.
Sonically, the album’s material features round fuzz-soaked guitar, lush vintage synths and deeply pocketed drum grooves that anchor constantly shifting arrangements informed by a blend of 70s prog rock, modern alternative rock production and a willingness to let mood, texture and movement take precedence over convention.
Topology’s latest single “AUTONOMATIC” is a psych rock-meets-prog rock ripper anchored around big fuzz guitar-driven riffs, deep rhythmic pocket-driven groove that showcases Holiday’s knack for punchy hooks and rousingly anthemic choruses while seemingly channeling JOVM mainstays POND, GUM and others.
“‘AUTONOMATIC: It’s a word I came up with by combining the words autonomy and automatic,” Holiday says. “Autonomatic: The built in or instinct desire for autonomy.
“’AUTONOMATIC’ talks about our changing relationships with machines,” Holiday continues. “How we might, at this point in history, use them to complete tasks and assist us with creativity. Maybe even help us socially, but especially with A.I, technology is progressing so rapidly it is so much more than a tool to finish an essay for us. If machines truly start to make decisions and ‘think’ for themselves…the natural progression could be that it will want to be like us in the deepest ways it can understand. We are free. We are autonomous. I think that this will be a natural evolution for a free thinking hyper intelligent entity. Autonomy. Built in autonomy. Hence the idea: they are Autonomatic.”
The album has taken on a visual life of its own, too. Sonically, Topology occupies a space where psychedelic atmosphere, alternative music, progressive exploration and experimental pop intersect — effortlessly. And visually, HOL1D4Y indulges in his love of psychedelic imagery. “For this project the visual aesthetic is especially important to me. I want to evoke different feelings in the listener and viewer, and it’s so much more effective when there’s both elements (audio and visual) present. So every song on this album will have some degree of visual element to it,” Holiday explains. “Colors and textures. . .people and places that evoke deeper feelings in us. Feelings that rest in the back of our minds and hearts through our ears and eyes.”
Directed by Sound + Vision Co.’s Aaron Eisenberg and Scott Holiday, the accompanying video for “AUTONOMATIC” features some fittingly mind-bending psychedelic imagery paired with footage cut from old sci-fi movies with robots and other nods to our dystopian present.
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