SPILL TRACK OF THE DAY: THE HOLY GASP – “BEAT WAVE”

In the great tradition of The Holy Gasp, no one can quite agree on what to call the music they’ve created. It’s somewhere between beatnik poetry and post-hardcore punk but those sort of limitations aren’t needed to appreciate the music. The Holy Gasp’s new single is a follow-up to the release,“The Last Generation of Love”, which came out in 2015.

This newest single ‘Beat Wave’ features 17 different players, including Karen Ng (Andy Shauf), Jessica Upton-Crowe (Beliefs), Nixon Boyd (Hollerado), and many other notable Toronto musicians.

This was the first song written for the album, and the first song written after frontman Benjamin Hackman’s divorce which inspired him to write new music.

“When my wife and I split up, I needed to make an extreme lifestyle change. I moved out to Toronto Island and started work on a new record. I started with Beat Wave. I was real depressed at the time. And real lonely, too. Most days I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d lay there on my stinked-up sheets, weeping… wishing for my old life back… They were dark days indeed. I needed to write it out, to laugh at myself, and to take the edge off and find a way to cheer myself up. Divorce shocks the system bad, you know. It makes you ask a whole lotta questions about how you’re gonna live your life and who you’re gonna be in your post-married world. You set out to build a future with someone, and when you call it quits on a marriage, you call it quits on that future too. So you gotta rewrite yourself entirely.“