Blackwater Holylight

Portland, then the deliberate removal of the safety net

Blackwater Holylight formed in Portland, Oregon in 2016 around Allison 'Sunny' Faris, who sings and plays bass and guitar. The early records came out on RidingEasy, and the group settled quickly into what writers labelled doomgaze: slow, low, alternately tuned riffs with a vocal set inside the distortion rather than over the top of it. The line-up changed more than once. Guitarist Mikayla Mayhew joined for the second album and is still in the band, alongside drummer Eliese Dorsay, and the three of them are the core of the group as it works today.

Three years before the current album, they left Portland for Southern California. Faris has described the move as removing the safety net of familiarity — a new city, new lives, none of the default rooms and default people that make a band's habits easy to repeat. The writing slowed to match. Material that would once have been finished quickly was left alone for months at a time, and some of the songs that ended up on the fourth album had been in progress for three years by the time they were recorded. That patience is the single most useful thing to know about the record they are touring now.

The relocation also changed what the songs are about. The new album is preoccupied with expansion, grief, letting go and healing, which Faris has put down plainly to writing while unsettled rather than while comfortable.

Three albums on RidingEasy, an EP that changed the label

The self-titled debut arrived in 2018 on RidingEasy, followed by Veils of Winter in 2019, which brought Mayhew in and expanded the band to five, and Silence/Motion in 2021. Silence/Motion is the one that moved them beyond the heavy-psych circuit and it remains the reference point reviewers use when they want to measure how far the band have since travelled. It set the template: shimmering, exposed vocal lines set against riffs that move at the pace of weather.

Then came a five-year gap between full-lengths and a change of home. If You Only Knew, a four-track EP, appeared on Suicide Squeeze on 18 April 2025 — three originals, 'Wandering Lost', 'Torn Reckless' and 'Fate Is Forward', plus a reading of Radiohead's 'All I Need'. It worked the quieter end of the band's range, layering guitar and synth over unhurried beats, and reviewers took it as a signal rather than a stopgap. All three originals went straight into the 2026 live set and have stayed there, which is a fair measure of how comfortably they sit against the newer material.

The EP also made the point that the band's heaviness is a matter of frequency and space rather than aggression. Critics writing about the follow-up kept returning to the same observation: the low end does the pressing, while everything above it is left deliberately open.

Not Here Not Gone

The fourth album, Not Here Not Gone, was released by Suicide Squeeze on 30 January 2026. It was recorded at Sonic Ranch outside El Paso, Texas, with Sonny Diperri producing, mixing and engineering, and mastered by Howie Weinberg. Ten tracks, opening with 'How Will You Feel' and closing on the seven-minute 'Poppyfields'. Faris is credited with vocals, guitar and bass, Mayhew with bass and guitar, Dorsay with drums, with Sarah McKenna on synths and Camille Getz on violin.

The oddity in the running order is 'Giraffe', a 75-second interlude built on beats by David Sitek of TV on the Radio. Faris has called it the only unplanned track on the album — the one thing that arrived by accident rather than through three years of waiting. 'Poppyfields' is dedicated to the victims of the Los Angeles fires of 2025, and is about as directly as the band have addressed the city they moved to.

The reception was strong and fairly unanimous. The Line of Best Fit gave it eight out of ten and read it as a balance between the weight of ordinary existence — thick bass, distorted guitar — and the openness of the electronics and reverb around it. Under the Radar called it the band's most assured record. Writing for The Sleeping Shaman, Lee Beamish heard something closer to a different band entirely, folding garage rock, shoegaze and doom into what he termed dream grunge, and credited the change to a group that had stopped worrying about every small detail and let itself experiment. The comparison that recurred was the Alice in Chains of Dirt, usually around 'Bodies'.

A year spent moving the record

They took it out almost immediately. A 26-date American run opened in San Diego on 13 February 2026 and worked across the country and back; by 10 March they were at Neumos in Seattle on a bill with SOM and MUÑECA. Europe followed through April and May. Roadburn in Tilburg invited them to make their festival debut on 18 April and to perform Not Here Not Gone in its entirety — a commission the festival does not hand out casually, and one the band treated as a marker of where the record had put them. Desertfest Berlin, Desertfest London and Sonic Rites in Helsinki came in the same stretch.

Speaking in July, Faris said festivals are the band's favourite format, for the sense of community among the acts as much as the audiences, and was warm about the American run shared with Glassing and SOM. She also said the band had already begun conceptualising ideas for the next record, which suggests the three-year gestation behind the last one was a product of circumstance rather than a new working method.

Where things stand at the end of September 2026

Since 9 September the band have been crossing North America as main support to Elder, who are touring their own album Through Zero, released on 29 May, with Bask on selected dates. The run was announced on 12 May and went on sale on 15 May. It began in Richmond, Asheville and Atlanta, moved west through Mesa, San Diego, the Regent Theater in Los Angeles on 18 September, San Jose, Vancouver, Portland and Seattle, then Salt Lake City and Denver before the eastern leg.

It has not finished cleanly. Elder's bassist Jack Donovan was hospitalised in Portland with a serious case of pneumonia; the band played at least one show as a three-piece before concluding they could not continue without him. On 24 September Elder postponed the remaining dates, with ticket-holders to be contacted about rescheduled shows and refunds available through the original point of purchase. No new dates have been announced. Ticketing and listing sites were still catching up at the end of the month — Toronto on 30 September and Boston on 3 October were showing as postponed while others had not yet been updated — so anyone holding a ticket should check with the venue rather than an aggregator.

For Blackwater Holylight specifically, the practical effect is an unplanned pause in the middle of their busiest year, with Bogart's in Cincinnati on 21 October standing as the next date outside the Elder run. The band themselves are not the reason for the stoppage and nothing has been said to suggest their own touring plans have changed beyond it.