Holly Head have spent years as one of the Manchester scene’s most in-demand and best-known cult concerns: an essential voice in what is probably Britain’s most exciting musical city right now, and one that the rest of the country is long overdue in catching up with. After a year without releasing new music, their latest single ‘No Country Is An Island’ sees the band distil their political edge into a rush of jagged guitars and driving grooves, signalling a long-awaited new chapter for the band. We spoke to them an hour before their first show on tour with Westside Cowboy, sitting in their small Airbnb opposite Scala to talk about everything from Manchester’s tight-knit scene to the rise in anti-migrant sentiment and newfound electronic influences.
Today is your first night on tour with Westside Cowboy. How are you feeling?
Joe: Very excited.
Liam: I’m nervous, admittedly. I don’t know about everyone else but it’s just a pretty big venue tonight. It’s almost jarring, but it should be fine. You’ve got to enjoy these nights.
Westside Cowboy are one of many bands in the Manchester scene that you’re close with. How helpful has that local community been to Holly Head?
Joe: It’s really good. Everybody’s very nice and there’s just lots of decent bands so you just get a lot of inspiration, like Josh’s other band The Great Unwashed, Shaking Hand and Westside Cowboy as well, they’ve all spurred us on.
Liam: There’s a lot of support between bands as well, like with No Band Is An Island, everyone’s coming together and giving each other opportunities whilst doing something really important. I think everyone’s on the same wavelength when it comes to politics and stuff as well, so everyone can resonate with that message.
Oscar: Everyone likes to see each other do well and support each other, obviously Westside Cowboy invited us on this tour which is probably our biggest opportunity to date, so it’s nice knowing that you have that support and it’d be nice if we could do the same when the big bucks come through.
Liam: And I’ve genuinely made all my friends through the Manchester music scene, everyone is so sound. I went to get curry with Bruno from Mleko on Monday – they were playing at the Moth Club when we played Sebright Arms so met up around the corner.
New single released yesterday, No Country Is An Island. What do you hope people think or feel when they listen to the new song?
Joe: Well it’s about the rise of anti-migrant framing and sentiment, especially in the last kind of five years with the Tories and now Labour and Reform. None of us really know the answers and the numbers to migration, but it just feels like people are having to prove their worth before they’re treated as a human being in this country. And we’ve got our own histories with migration – Liam’s from America, he moved here when he was seven, and my mum’s side were Romani people from Russia. We live in a global world, everybody should be entitled to the best that they can have in life. And it’s just not nice to see what’s happening so we tried to put that in a song.
Joe you’ve done protests with Just Stop Oil and Animal Rising which has resulted in huge fines and nights in police cells, what makes you want to keep doing it?
Joe: I’ve been prosecuted numerous times but never to a… I think they call it a judicial point, where you go to prison. But you just see videos of slaughterhouses for animal farming and the cruelty doesn’t feel real, it’s not even fathomable. I did it mostly in 2023 to early 2024, and was going through the court system through 2024 and 2025. At the time, I had the privilege to do it a bit more, like I had a student loan and support from my family to do it. But seeing these things like animal suffering and the climate crisis destroying people’s homes and making them have to leave everything they know, I kind of have to take on what I can to do something about it.
The working title for No Country Is An Island was Afrobeat, and there’s a lot of jungle, Afro and Latin influences in your work. What makes you want to bring that in and how do you fuse it cohesively with a post-punk sound?
Liam: Oscar’s a very good proper jungle DJ.
Oscar: Yeah I listen to very little of the kind of music Holly Head makes, I mainly listen to electronic and rave music, and a bit of jazz with some Afro-y stuff, and that’s the only influence I bring to the band. When I play certain beats, me and Liam tend to fuse quite well, he responds well to what I do and the guitars sort of ring over the top like a blanket.
Liam: We used to listen to a lot of Wu-Lu and mixes of hip-hop with heavy guitars as well as the shoegaze music that was kind of our blueprint early on. I think we’re changing that as time goes on because we have this new song called 5’4″, which I think is like the favourite child that blends every end of Holly Head into one song.
Have you got any non-musical influences, like films or artists?
Liam: It was Joe who created the visual aspect of what Holly Head is. t was inspired from, like, 90s American hardcore and post-hardcore stuff, like film-looking pictures and VHS recordings.
Joe: Yeah, I love a lot of Japanese photography and clothing – I’m a bit of a Pinterest dweller. A lot of the Japanese deeper greens and colours, the beauty and the orderness to it is very nice, I like that a lot. I want to take every kind of aspect of all of our lives into it so that it’s commentary on what I see in my life. But I need to read more poetry. I watched a fucking brilliant poet, I think Wilfred Owen, the old Doctor Who read it on a BBC video and it was very good. We did it in GCSE, it’s an Italian title about Dolce something or other.
It’s nearly a year to the day since you released your second single. How do you think the band has developed in that year?
Joe: That was the first song we wrote as a band, it defines where we started very well but I wouldn’t say it defines how we sound now. I mean, put it like this, until yesterday that’s our most recent single and we don’t even have it in our set. We really don’t feel like it sounds like us anymore, I think we have better songs now and we don’t get a long set so we want to show the best of us.
Liam: I think we’re just trying to play more with melody and rhythm in our music and that song is very stop and go, just straight clean cut guitar riffs. It’s the most post-punk song we have and I think our more recent stuff has more substance and we enjoy playing them more.
Joe: I guess we’ve been through a pretty tough year, none of us drive so we’re always getting public transport, it fucking sucks, and one of the songs is about the trains and the implications it has on your life, because I think people don’t realise how integral it is to a functioning society for people to be able to get around cheap and efficiently – it’s not really like that at the moment. But we’ve got more opportunities over the last year, this will be our third time playing in London in the last two weeks. There’s been ups and downs, money’s been fucking hard and life’s been hard, it’s been a struggle but we’re really excited to be here tonight long may it continue.
Liam: It’s good fun, we promise.
Where do you see Holly Head a year in the future, what would you like to have achieved?
Joe: Westside Cowboys supporting us at the O2.
Oscar: We want to have an EP out and more consistent music going, we want to be doing stuff like this more often. As long as we’re still doing it and enjoying it, I’ll just be happy with that.
Liam: Playing live is one of the most fun things I can do, I’m sure we’d all agree that Holly Head is more of a live band. Still stream it.
Joe: We’ve struggled a bit with fully getting the sound that we want. We’ve been known as a live band because we try and give a lot of energy but I think we want to work on getting a real good studio sound and translating the live energy. What else? One of us would love to be able to drive. Maybe stop smoking too.
Words: Donovan Livesey
