As Holding Absence announce their third full-length album, Modern Life Is Lonely, frontman Lucas Woodland exclusively takes Kerrang! into their evolutionary sound, the "bleakness" that informs its lyrics, and the emotions of robots...
“If you had your favourite meal every day, you’d start to go off it,” Lucas Woodland explains. “I did have my favourite meal every day, and that was Holding Absence. Then I had a year off of it.”
2025 was the year where Holding Absence let things decelerate, departing from their usual 100-shows-a-year routine to take a breath and reflect. Crucially, they didn’t just have to recharge their bodies and minds, but their love for what they do.
“I know what it’s like to not have this in my life now and I know how much I miss it,” says Lucas, so it’s making me work even harder...”
As has been long established, Holding Absence make music for people with big hearts and even bigger feelings, who see themselves reflected in the cathartic soul-searching of their artistic output. Their sense of devotion shines through their songs, but it also propels them through their challenges. One such challenge arrived during a cortisol-fuelled past few days when Lucas’ U.S. visa didn’t arrive on time, forcing them to hurriedly rearrange their slot at Welcome To Rockville. Lucas is still in the U.S. now for Sonic Temple, dialling in from a truck stop on a sunny afternoon in Ohio and apologising as he moves around trying to find a strong internet connection.
“You owe it to yourself to make it work, because this is my life,” he says. “It sounds dumb, but if this doesn't work, then everything I've tried has failed. This is my absolute life. I feel like I owe it to my younger self. I owe it to the many times that I've bust my ass working and playing shows, and I do it for that guy.”
That same devotion has been funnelled into Holding Absence’s fourth album, Modern Life Is Lonely. Due to land on August 28 via the band’s new home Sumerian, it’s an album characterised by a desire to reimagine their sound while keeping true to their essence even as they metamorphose. They’re dabbling with new textures and influences as varied as hyperpop and lo-fi, while also building in a greater sense of intensity. Modern Life Is Lonely is the most surprising and complex that Holding Absence has ever been.
So, naturally, we got Lucas to take us into the record, starting with why he felt the necessity of change after the close of their previous trilogy of albums, to the looming threat of AI, and on the unique inspiration Blur gave them…
How did the groundwork for Modern Life Is Lonely end up getting laid?
“It started when we were doing the Senses Fail tour in 2023, so it’s been a three-year-long process, to be honest. We knew we wanted to change a lot, but we also didn't know what would work. It was a long process of trying and failing, but behind closed doors, I think we've written 11 of the best songs we possibly could have. But we also scrapped a lot of songs, because we were like, ‘These aren't right.’ Some of the best Holding Absence songs ever are probably in the bin from this process because we knew we couldn't put out another Wilt or another Afterlife.”
What made that evolution feel so urgent and necessary for you?
“This is the fourth album, we're all in our 30s, this is where bands stick or twist. They either keep writing the same stuff over and over, or they completely destroy everything so it doesn't resemble who they are at all. We knew we wanted to stick and twist. We knew we wanted to completely change and maintain all the parts of our band that people loved. We’ve seen so many bands fail in different ways, but we didn't want to stagnate and we didn't want to implode either.”
Modern Life Is Lonely as a title certainly speaks to a feeling a lot of us have right now. What does that phrase mean to you?
“It’s a reference to Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. That album came out 30 years ago and I think it's interesting that modern life has changed since the last time a band made a commentary on it in that way. With Holding Absence, I spent three albums going through musical therapy, finding myself very internally, and then with this one now it was like, I wanted to look at the world around me.
“I didn't want it to be a ‘We live in a society’ type of album. When I think about the song, Modern Life Is Lonely, for example, that song is about overstimulation, feeling like the world has let you down. It's plugged you into a machine. It's made you feel all these things, and somehow you still feel lonely on the other side of it. I think this is weirdly the most hopeless Holding Absence album, because I've actually looked at everything around me and realised there was a lot of bleakness in the world at the moment.”
You’ve got a new song called Reflection out today too. What’s that song’s story?
“Reflection is an explosive song. When I was working on that song, I remember thinking, ‘This is such a big chorus, I want the lyrics to reflect that as well,’ in a way that you could read those lyrics and know that the chorus is going to be epic. It's a song about impatience and purpose and it can absolutely apply to anything really, this idea of, ‘I want this thing.’ The other important part of the chorus is that conclusive line, ‘I'll never find myself in the end if I don't learn to love my own reflection.’ It makes you realise maybe you're the thing holding you back. You need to love who it is that is trying to enter that door.”
You’ve got a robot friend, Y4-BB0, in your visuals. What does he represent in the grand scheme of what you’re creating?
“He’s a foil, because he exists to remind us of how special humanity is. We're so lucky to be human. We're so lucky to feel all these things, and that's why that robot character exists. Imagine not being able to feel anything, just being able to think it all. Feeling is probably the most special part of being a human.”
It’s interesting you have a robot character to explore those human themes through when AI is proving such a threat. You went viral last year for revealing that an AI band that ripped off your music had overtaken your monthly listeners on Spotify – how has that altered your perspective on what musicians are up against right now?
“That is the kind of point of it really – the idea is that it's sad to be a robot. You listen to these AI artists, and it's fucking miserable. There’s no humanity, there's no relatability, there's no connection. The whole album is kind of a commentary on AI, really, because it's a human album. The idea of using AI to write music is completely the opposite of the point of why we do what we do. AI is closer to a conveyor belt or a mechanism that exists to serve a purpose than it is to a paintbrush or a banjo or ballerina. The reason art exists isn't to get a product. The reason art exists is to experience it. I think that's what a lot of people are missing, actually, is we're not trying to make corporate slop. We're trying to make art and that's why it's important. Every aspect of this campaign was painstakingly made by humans, for humans, with a human touch.”
Modern Life Is Lonely is released August 28 via Sumerian Records.
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