SPOTLIGHT: The Return of Slow Hollows
“WE ARE ANNOUNCING OUR SPECIAL GUEST TOMORROW…” — read the caption of Viva! Music Festival’s Instagram post on June 22, posted three weeks away from the event’s kickoff.
The long-running and locally cherished indie festival that took place at The Glass House in Pomona announced this year’s lineup earlier this June. The Red Pears would headline alongside Coco & Clair Clair, with a mystery guest “???” listed for Sunday. If someone could guess who it was, they’d win festival passes for the weekend. But no one could have guessed that the special guest was Slow Hollows.
It wasn’t the most obvious choice, considering Slow Hollows, the Los Angeles project conceived by songwriter Austin Anderson, broke up three years ago and had not come out with new music since. That is, until they were announced as Viva!’s special guest. Those following the artist’s page on Bandcamp got a notification on June 23 for “In A Hole,” their new song produced by friend and Surf Curse/Current Joys spearhead Nick Rattigan.
“I think we just felt right,” Anderson tells me in the green room of The Glass House, ahead of their set that weekend. “We love Rene [Contreras] and Viva! so much that I think whenever the offer came in, even if it was a year ago or a year from now, we would have chosen that as the first jumping-back-in point. It’s mostly because we love playing Viva!.”
Now, Anderson plays with a live band of old friends: Nick Santana, drummer and original member of the band in its early days, Nick Minor on bass, and Nick Noneman on drums.
“In A Hole” is two minutes of acoustic simplicity. Its chorus seems oddly fitting for their first new song back: “Live in a hole, I can’t do light / I never think but I think that I might / I can’t do war, I’m just too nice / Pack up and shack up and float for a while.” Listening to the song is like being in the studio next to Anderson and Rattigan, in between mic stands and computers while a movie plays softly in the background.
“We can probably make something out of that,” Anderson says in the song as it wraps. Rattigan replies, “Hell yeah, we can.”
“In A Hole” was initially going to be a Current Joys song before it ended up a Slow Hollows song. It started as a demo while the two were in the studio working on the band’s upcoming album. After Rattigan lost the file for it, the song stayed as somewhat of a demo release. After writing songs alone since 2020, Anderson was itching to throw a new track out there.
“It was the only thing that was floating around that seemed low-key enough to put out,” Anderson shares. “There’s nothing really that special about it, which I feel like makes it special.
Slow Hollows’ return follows a three-year hiatus that was announced ahead of a headlining tour in 2020. The band, then consisting of Anderson, Daniel Fox, Aaron Jassenoff, and Jackson Katz, announced their breakup only three months after they released their third record, Actors. It was experimental and innovative, a tremendous step in a different direction following 2016’s Romantic and 2015’s Atelophobia.
The album, complete with fascinating new compositions and star-studded recording credits, turned heads in the industry. Major press outlets saw them as the next rising artist. Anderson and his manager considered label offers for Actors, contrary to their previous releases on Danger Collective Records. Anderson had a short modeling stint for Louis Vuitton and Calvin Klein and was constantly touted as a Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean–supported wunderkind. The band’s rise to fame was happening very fast when, suddenly, they stopped altogether.
“Around that time, I just kind of remember feeling like I was not in my element,” Anderson shares. “I think it felt like we had made something that kind of took on a life that we didn’t really realize at the time.”
The new synth-pop sound of Actors was an attractive selling point to record companies. It conjured new expectations for their future that, as Anderson put it, “started to freak [him] out a little bit.” People in the industry suggested Slow Hollows tour with certain bands and sign to certain labels.
“I just think that we were a little in over our heads,” he adds. “I think we’re more comfortable in a setting like this, like at Viva!, just playing our songs.”
“Is that how you feel now, still?” I ask him.
“Definitely, yeah,” he responds. “Now, I don’t care at all. I mean, I just care a lot about making songs that I like and making sure all my friends are covered… that we’re having fun beyond anything else.”
The band came to the idea of ending Slow Hollows around Nov. 2019, a month after the Actors release. Austin was working on new songs, and after bringing them to Reed Kanter of Danger Collective, Kanter was supportive of Anderson’s prospective future. The band decided they would see out the tour they booked for the next year and then call it.
“I think it mostly was, not necessarily anything about the music, but I think that we were just burnt out with playing live,” Anderson explains. “Obviously we’re all best friends, but we were really tired and a little bit… bored. I think we definitely made what we wanted to make at that point. I think the way that I contextualize it now is that I personally was just very bored with guitar music. Daniel and I were doing a lot of production work for other artists. We were getting a really big kick out of making computer-sounding music. [Actors is] a fun, weird album. I try not to think about it too much, though.”
Unless Anderson and his new band have to play older songs live, he explains that he tries to push away thoughts of any of his past work. Slow Hollows’ set at Viva! consisted of songs on Atelophobia and Romantic, paying a lot of fan service to those who have loved the band since their beginnings. They even ended their set with “I’m Just as Bad as You Are,” a 2014 deep cut and infamous fan favorite.
The group's earlier work fit right into the indie-punk scene in LA at the time. An LA native, Anderson wrote and performed songs from I’m Just as Bad as You Are while he and his friends/bandmates were still in high school. One of his objectives was mainly “to play songs that would make people move.” He’s humble when he talks about Slow Hollows’ place in the indie scene.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” he explains. “There was no conscious effort of trying to make it feel like anything other than just the four of us playing… I don’t think that it necessarily was anything deeper than that, which is probably the beauty of it, really, and what made it age well.”
Even if Anderson wasn’t conscious of the band’s place in the scene at the time, Slow Hollows’ listeners and fans definitely knew that it was something special. In the late 2010s, surf punk and garage rock seemed to take over The Smell (LA’s famed DIY venue) with alumni such as Surf Curse, Cherry Glazerr, and SadGirl rotating on stage. Although Slow Hollows had their share of mosh-pit and stage-diving erupting songs such as “Dark Comedy” and “Hospital Flowers,” their music was always poignant and thoughtful. The band slowly matured during Romantic, an album backed by acoustic guitars, trumpets, and a sense of delicacy. Anderson’s songwriting, although open for interpretation by his listeners, still seemed like a secret unbeknownst to anyone but him.
These elements, along with its sense of nostalgia, make so many fans of Slow Hollows die-hard, in it for the long haul. “Reminds me of long car rides wit the homies,” reads a comment on their Bandcamp page for I’m Just as Bad as You Are. “One of the most cathartic albums to me,” on Atelophobia. “The song [“Softer”] is kind of sad but makes me love the world more,” on Romantic.
“The music industry can be a weird world if you open yourself up to it,” Anderson tells me. “But now, the team that we have working with us, we’re all best friends… It’s kind of like a little family affair where everybody cares so much but also none of us give a shit anymore. I don’t think I’d be here at Viva! or doing Slow Hollows again if it wasn’t for this group we have now.”
Playing a set at The Glass House for Viva! Music Fest seemed like a homecoming of sorts. Anderson makes it clear how much Slow Hollows was nurtured by his friendships he found within his band, with promoters like Contreras, and at his label, Danger Collective. The label fostered the careers of Model/Actriz, Momma, and Salvia Palth, and is an artist-run and community-first team of people. Being surrounded by his community allowed Anderson to continue music at all.
“It keeps you confident in yourself,” he says. “It keeps me from overthinking anything. I feel like I’ve got my universe. That sounds a little crazy, but it’s our world, our ship, you know?”
What’s next for Slow Hollows? According to Anderson, a new album is on the way. He’s keeping the time and other details to himself for now. His approach is a lot more relaxed than it used to be: “I’m trying not to feel as precious about the putting-out part of it,” he says. It’s clear that whenever it does come, Anderson has devoted listeners and loved ones waiting for it on the other side.
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