Heavenly Recordings

David Holmes has announced details of his first solo album since 2008’s The Holy Pictures. Blind On A Galloping Horse is due for release on Heavenly Recordings on 10th November 2023.

Blind On A Galloping Horse was written , produced and arranged by David Holmes. The album features updated versions of the previously released singles Hope Is The Last Thing To Die and It’s Over If We Run Out Of Love and a recording of an unreleased song by Holmes’ late friend Andrew Weatherall (I Laugh Myself To Sleep). All of the album’s artwork was designed by British graphic designer Jimmy Turrell. The cover shot was taken post riot in 70’s Belfast by local cult street photographer Bill Kirk.

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A 14-track interrogation of the last decade, time spent watching a decaying, fraying Britain visibly buckling in real time while tending to his own battles with mental health. Holmes’ soundtrack to this inquiry is at times claustrophobic, often euphoric, driven by the rattle and snap of analogue drum machines, wild oscillations of droning analogue synths and the voice of Raven Violet which beguiles and commands in a way that could part oceans.

On this record, there are songs of hope for an age of uncertainty; love songs to leap the barricades to and, on Necessary Genius, a comprehensive roll call of the great and good - those ‘dreamers, misfits, radicals, outcasts’ that we’ve lost and just a few who’ve managed to cling on in the churn of the 21st century. And there are elegiac electronics evocative of an endless Europe where pulsating, crackling rhythm tracks fuse with dreamlike textures and the underground pulse of psychedelic therapy to form something unique that feels nothing less than radical.

Throughout Blind on A Galloping Horse, there are spoken word accounts from Afghan and Ukrainian refugees now welcomed as residents in Belfast, alongside a Palestinian ambulance driver and French and Irish observers of the UK’s turmoil of recent years. Their voices add to the feeling that this record is a call to action, a motivation and a head clearing, slate wiping journey. As the opening When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified song goes, “I wanna sleep on the wind, I wanna live, I don’t wanna rust / I wanna breath, I wanna fly, not rot in the dirty dust”. Calls to action have rarely sounded so inviting.