HOLSMAN Share “Perfect! Thank You!” Single & Video

HOLSMAN, the Chicago indie-punk outfit led by Ryan Holsman and Dan Tinkler, will release their debut full-length, Sally, on the 28th August. Today the band have shared their new single and accompanying video for Perfect! Thank You!, which shines with the same caustic angst that runs through the record, paired with a music video riffing on the Warhol classic in which a camera watches the pop artist eat Burger King. Though Holsman wrote the bulk of material for his eponymous project by his lonesome at a kitchen table,there are some key contributors, like Krystal Erdman on who contributes to Perfect! Thank You!

“She was a friend who ended up being at the right place at the right time when I realized I wanted another voice for this call-and-response feel, It must’ve been a pretty great bonding moment, too, because not too much time later we ended up dating. The Warhol tie-in is there because the song itself is pretty artsy and weird. It’s a sarcastic response to life when it gets rough. This is a song for people who feel like they’re the total opposite of who they are and where they want to be.”

Another important member of the HOLSMAN project is Dan Tinkler, who contributed bass on the album and is credited for production. “If we’re being honest, he’s probably put more into this record than I have,” Holsman admits, recalling how pivotal Tinkler has been since the time they first met a decade ago. “In 2016, I reached out to Chicago’s Atlas Studios. I found out that they were recording and producing several of my favorite bands and I figured there’s no harm in reaching out. When I called, I expected to speak with producer Matt Allison, but instead, a soft spoken 25-year-old picked up the phone. It was Dan. And I vividly remember that the first thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing,’ and to my surprise, he took me under his wing. Fast forward a decade, and here we are. There isn’t another person on the planet I trust more than this dude.”

Sally took three years to produce. It plays as a concept album following two twenty-somethings, both survivors of abusive childhoods, as they try to build an adult relationship out of materials neither of them was given. “The highs were really high, and the lows were really low,” Holsman says. “To say things can get messy is an understatement.” He’s also pointed to how gender shapes stories like this one differently: men tend to get written out of them, while women get flattened into “manic pixie dream girl” types instead of people. Sally is Holsman’s attempt to write both halves of that story honestly, and to hand something useful to anyone still in the middle of it.

Sonically, the album sits at the intersection of HOLSMAN’s two biggest reference points: the bruised, big-chorus punk of The Menzingers and Against Me!, and the loose, hook-first songcraft of 1960s pop. “I wanted to write a love letter to my favorite bands, who pretty much dominated my formative years. As a kid I listened to a lot of ’60s rock too, and I think it’s actually pretty apt to say combining those two influences gets you a record like this one,” he says, adding that at the end of the day, the album is about unyielding hope. “Even though it’s hard to get honest about these kinds of things, I wrote this record to assure other people who are in the thick of it that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.” It’s also, unmistakably, a Chicago record, built inside and in tribute to the city’s long-running punk lineage.