Holy Show formed in the early months of their music course in Dunboyne, 2024. Cathal and Emily began writing songs together just a few weeks in – “Vacancy” being the first. What started as a writing partnership quickly grew into a band, with Ben and Alex joining soon after. Their first rehearsal took place in Ben’s bedroom, and from that point on, they met weekly to write, rehearse, and chase the thrill of live performance.
By March, they were on stage at Fibber Magees. Within months, they’d played Whelan’s, The Button Factory, The Grand Social, and The Soundhouse – building a reputation for their heavy, melancholic sound laced with catchy hooks and wiry guitar lines.
Their influences are a tangle of contradictions: Dream Theater’s technicality, Paramore’s urgency, the rawness of Smashing Pumpkins, the groove of RHCP. But it’s in the shared admiration for artists like Deftones and Jeff Buckley that their sound finds its emotional core – equal parts grit and grace.
The name “Holy Show” arrived in a flurry of group chat messages exchanged over Christmas Day, somewhere between family parties. It was Alex who mentioned Pillow Queens’ “Holy Show,” and something about it stuck. A nod to the Irish phrase, a wink to a band they love, and a name that felt like it already belonged to them.
“Vacancy” began in December 2023 as a voice memo titled Jeff Buckley guitar inspo. Written on acoustic guitar nearly a year before Holy Show existed, the song lived in limbo for months – unfinished, waiting. “I struggled to create anything for it vocally at the time, so it ended up being put aside for close to 9 months,” Emily says. “Just before I started college (and met the guys) last September, I revisited the progression and ended up improvising what is now the verse within five minutes of playing around with melodies.”
The song became a way to process a period of emotional dislocation: “I was thinking a lot about a dark period that I’d gone through the year before and wanted to express how it felt now that enough time had passed for me to be able to put it into words. During the dark period I’d been feeling really disconnected from myself and helplessly stuck in this place where I wasn’t happy in any part of my life. I’d known at the time that it was my own responsibility to get myself out of this place, but I couldn’t help but wish that someone would just appear and save me instead. I wanted to explain this feeling that I’d had through this song to fully process and understand what it was that I’d gone through.“
A month and a half later, a half-finished version of “Vacancy” was played in class. The chorus had only just been written. Cathal and Alex approached afterward, both drawn in by the song’s rawness. “This was actually what started my friendships with the two of them,” Emily reminisces. A few weeks later, Cathal and Emily sat down to write together. “He asked if I wanted to start a band. Later that night when I went home, I ended up finishing the whole song acoustically.”
When Holy Show rehearsed for the first time in December, “Vacancy” was the first song they completed as a band. Cathal added rhythm guitar and embellishments, Alex wrote a lead part that echoed the vocal melody, and Ben shaped the drums to mirror the emotional arc. The song began to shift – what started as folk-rock was now veering into alt-rock territory.
The final piece was Alex’s guitar solo, written into the instrumental outro. “The solo that you hear in the song was entirely improvised on the spot in the recording studio, as is every version of it that you’ll hear live, but we all agree that the solo that made it into the final track is Alex’s best work.”
The last chorus is a storm of layered vocals – a total of ten vocal tracks stacked to the edge of collapse. “My intention was to mimic the effect of overwhelm and the sound of multiple voices circling around in your head. Each layer is meant to build up and up until it suddenly stops as if it’s an emotional breaking point.”
Though it took only a month to write and arrange, “Vacancy” wasn’t recorded until a year later – after six months of live shows had shaped it into something sharper, heavier, more haunted. It remains one of the band’s collective favourites. A song born in isolation, finished in communion.
VACANCY IS OUT NOW.
M. Müller, 2025
Photo Credits: @dddenis_0