Since their very first release, Holy Wars have been reckoning with darkness with a clarity few other bands can.
A project born in the wake of devastating loss, their 2017 debut EP ‘Mother Father’ was dedicated to the parents of vocalist Kat Leon after their passing. An emotionally raw and visceral collection of songs, underpinned by a sound rooted in gritty vulnerability and cinematic ambition, it lived in a place between earth-shattering pain and hopeful defiance, offering a powerful lifeline to anyone navigating their own darkness.
After sharpening their vision through years of touring, personal growth, and experimentation, on the band’s second album ‘Shadow Work/Light Work’, everything clicks into focus. Written in the aftermath of another profound loss in Kat’s life, it’s a record directly shaped by grief, trauma, and the unpredictable process of healing. Both their heaviest and most melodically rich work to date, it finds Holy Wars returning to their darker, more vulnerable roots while pushing their sound into something bigger, bolder, and more fully realised than ever before.
Ahead of the album’s release, we caught up with Kat and guitarist/producer Nick Perez to talk about stepping into their next era, writing for bigger rooms, and why they hope these songs can become a space for people to feel whatever they need to feel.
RS: This album feels like a turning point for Holy Wars, like you’ve really stepped into the band’s identity and figured out what you want to be. At what point did this stop feeling like just the next record, and start feeling like a really important chapter for you?
KAT: “You definitely nailed it. That is exactly how we were feeling. It came from Nick first. He already knew sound-wise what he wanted to do with this album before we even wrote it.”
NICK: “Yeah. If you look at the history of the band, it’s very diverse, because it comes from Kat and I doing what we want. We have always done what we wanted, and sometimes it didn’t feel like it all totally went together, but it made sense to us.
“When we first started, we made a really emotional EP about Kat’s parents. Once we started touring, that changed everything for us. We started changing the music and figuring out what we wanted to do. When it came time to do this record, we said, ‘We want to go back to the feeling of that first EP. We want to tap back into that emotion, but we want it to work in a live setting too. We want to have these really big moments.’ That’s when things really started to take shape for us.”
RS: Across this whole record, something that stands out is the idea of duality. There’s this sense of learning to live with two opposing sides of yourself or the world, and acknowledging that darkness has to exist for the light to mean anything. Was that a central idea from the beginning, both lyrically and sonically?
KAT: “Definitely. The first song that we knew we wanted to shape the album around was ‘I Feel Everything’, and that was the second song we wrote for the album. The first song for the album was ‘Crucify’, which we did with Cody Quistad of Wage War. That’s a banger, but tit didn’t fit in the concept of the whole album as neatly.
“‘I Feel Everything’ was definitely that first song where it clicked that we wanted this album to be all heart. When we did the ‘Mother Father’ EP, there was no wanting to sound like a certain thing. It just was all what we felt in that moment. Our first release was actually a song called ‘I Can’t Feel A Thing’, so we wanted that callback with ‘I Feel Everything’. It’s been ten years since my parents passed, and I just lost my sister in the middle of this album. It was completely unexpected, and it unintentionally brought me back to the emotional state I was in during the first EP. I felt like I was grieving my parents all over again through my sister’s passing.
“That juxtaposition is important for us in that, especially when we have a song with very heavy lyrical context, like ‘Ceremony’ which is a song about suicidal thoughts. Nick always comes at it from a place of, ‘How do we empower people instead of it just being bad for bad’s sake?’ We wanted to make sure that the music has that polarity with the lyrical context. It even comes into the two sides of the album, going from ‘Shadow Work’ – which lyrically throughout does have a darker tone – the lyrics of ‘Light Work’ feel very different. The songs feel brighter, they feel more alive. We never want to lean fully into one direction. We always want to have that balance. How we execute it always surprises us though.”
RS: Where did the decision to split it into two halves come from?
KAT: “Originally, we wanted to do two EPs. After we had written ‘I Feel Everything’, we knew that we wanted to call it ‘Shadow Work/Light Work’, and the two releases were going to be this yin and yang thing. After discussing it with the team though, we realised that we were ready for the second album. It’s kind of like choosing your adventure. You can start wherever you want. I prefer ‘Shadow’ and then ‘Light’, but by all means, do whatever you want with it.”
RS: Sonically, it really feels like you removed the limits on yourselves here. There’s this sense that instead of asking, ‘Does this fit what we’re supposed to be doing?’, you just followed what each song needed…
NICK: “In the past, we’ve often made music inspired by music that’s a bit more understated. Grunge acts like Failure have always been a big influence for us, music that is understated in some ways but also very emotional.
“When it came time to do this album though, we wanted it to be as big and impactful as possible. We wanted it to have that ‘wow’ factor. I tried to fill the songs out as much as I possibly could.”
RS: Kat, thematically this is a deeply personal record for you. Grief is one of those things that everyone will likely go through at some point, but it’s always unique to the person living it. How do you go about telling that story in a way that’s true to your experience, while still leaving room for other people to see themselves in it?
KAT: “It’s definitely a challenge, because I say ‘I’ a lot. I have a lot of words and not enough time, and not enough space in a song to fit it in. That’s where Nick helps a lot.
“‘Everything You’ was the first song that we wrote after my sister’s passing. That song has lines like, ‘My bloodline is cold’, but I try to use words that could also be metaphorical. When we’re writing, Nick asks a lot of questions like, ‘What’s the part that the person all the way in the back would really love? What would they want to sing?’
“With this album I tried to get in the mindset of not just myself, but how everybody else feels. I wanted to learn how to take an experience and still keep it very personal to me, but use imagery or references in the lyrics to help the listener see themselves in the song. That is what so many artists that inspired me and made me want to be a writer myself did for me.
RS: A song that does that beautifully is ‘Metamorphosis’. It feels like it closes a chapter, but also leaves the book open with more still to be told. What did that song come to represent in the story of the record?
KAT: “I love that it’s the last song on the album. I wanted to leave it on that feeling that you have this opportunity for another chapter. You can go on.
“There’s so much pain in transformation. Obviously, I’m not a caterpillar, but I imagine the cocoon state as what we feel as humans. Nobody transforms just because everything’s going great. You have to get pushed off that ledge emotionally and then find yourself in the rubble.
“I feel like ‘Metamorphosis’ was the best way to express the process of healing. What’s beyond that pain could be something very beautiful if you allow yourself to feel it and get to the other side.”
RS: Where you make a record often bleeds into what it becomes, and Joshua Tree is one of those places that people seem to get so much out of creatively. Did being there have a noticeable impact on what this album became?
KAT: “Oh, definitely. I think we were meant to move there to make this album. We lived there for two years, and the whole time we were making this album.”
NICK: “We loved it there. It is an incredible place to make music. One thing that definitely had an impact on the album is that when we were living in LA, we were in an apartment. When you have neighbours, there are hours where it’s not polite to play your music at the volume that is fun to listen to.
“In Joshua Tree, we had no neighbours, and we had this gigantic house with our gear everywhere. I could play music as loud as I wanted to, which I did all through the early hours of the morning. That is a very fun thing to do when you’re making loud rock music that you want to be thunderous.
KAT: “There’s not a lot of noise there either, it’s completely silent. It forces you to go inward. That was perfect for an album that became very introspective, even unintentionally. I do believe that this album would not exist if we weren’t living in Joshua Tree.”
RS: It feels like every opportunity you’ve had leading up to this point has fed into what this record became too. Touring, playing bigger shows, sharing stages with artists you admire… how much did that affect the confidence and clarity you brought into this album?
KAT: “Hugely. I think the only way to really grow is to just start doing it all. We’ve had the opportunity to share stages with our heroes, bands like Evanescence, and Nick’s played with Poppy and opened for Bad Omens. I think that was inspiring for him because it meant he was playing on huge stages, seeing the fans’ reaction to it. That gave him the confidence to be like, ‘We can totally do this.’”
NICK: “Touring had a big impact on how the sound has developed. When we first started, we didn’t know what audience we were playing to. We were trying to write music that would fit in a room like The Echo in LA, which is a club that holds around 300 people. Then, the stages kept getting bigger, and we were doing festivals and playing with Evanescence in an arena. It was then that we realised that we wanted to write music that belongs there.”
RS: How are you feeling about bringing these songs to life on stage? What do you want that world to look and feel like in a room?
KAT: “Visuals mean so much to me. I love filmmaking, and I edit all the videos that we put out online. I love the aesthetic that is built around this album, and we even rebranded our logo because we knew it was a shift.
“When we perform live, I perform with a real punk attitude. I’m thrashing around, running around the stage, and I’m not stopping for one moment to breathe. The new music has so much melody for a vocal perspective though, and so I’m going to need to figure out how I approach that. I need to find a balance between leaning into this visual world while also being a little Tasmanian devil on stage.”
NICK: “In terms of playing the music live, one thing that we’ve always done is make unique live arrangements of the songs. We’ll extend parts, and by doing that we learn a lot of new things about the songs. That always affects the way that we write in the future.”
RS: For the people sitting down with this record for the first time, it’s an album that needs to be listened to in sequence. When someone puts their headphones on and goes from one side to the other, what do you hope they’re able to take from it?
KAT: “I want them to love it, but I also want them to find their own voice in it. I’m hoping that if somebody is going through something hard at the moment, and maybe feels like they can’t talk to their friends or family about it, this is a place for them. I’m fortunate to have a lot of friends, but my whole family is gone now. I call myself an orphan, even though I have had parents. I’m on a quest to find my family of orphans, my family of misfits.
“Lyrically, I want people to see this album as a safe place and to be able to identify themselves within that space. I want brevity for people. You have to face something to get through it, but then you can let it go, exhale, and start a new path for yourself. Life can’t always be so challenging. As much as it’s therapy, I want this album to feel light at the same time. There is shadow, but there is no light without shadow and vice versa. We are complex species on this floating rock in space. What are we going to do with our time?”
