HOLISSSTIK release their debut album, "Chapter I: This Endless Solitude", tomorrow — Friday, August 14 — through Season of Mist. All eight songs are already streaming in full on the label's YouTube channel.
The project belongs to Tor-Helge Skei, who has spent more than thirty years pushing at the edges of both black metal and electronic music as the driving force behind Trondheim's MANES and as one half of LETHE, his duo with ex-ELUVEITIE and CELLAR DARLING singer Anna Murphy. HOLISSSTIK is his most expansive vehicle yet: a dark collective experiment built around underground legends and rising stars from the avant-garde.
The name explains the method. "The inspiration for HOLISSSTIK comes from the Greek word Hólos, which is the root for the English word 'whole'," Skei says. "Collaboration is the heart and soul of this project. The idea is that each part cannot exist or be understood when separated from the whole. The sum is greater than its parts."
That principle was applied at some risk. Skei began in 2024 by reworking sketches — some a decade or more old — into eight mostly instrumental compositions, then handed them to a flood of guests with almost no brief attached. The music would be in minor keys, melancholic and introspective, and the lyrics would concern the darker side of life and death; beyond that, no rules, no restrictions. Roughly twenty collaborators answered, among them Anna Murphy, Marita Hellem, RAGE OF LIGHT's Martyna Halas, and longtime MANES accomplice Torstein Parelius on bass and lyrics, alongside players from ATROX, THE THIRD AND THE MORTAL and elsewhere. Buddhist monks were persuaded to contribute chanting. The album is mostly in English, but also carries Pali, French, Polish and Italian.
Skei then spent months reassembling the returns into a single organism. "As the collaborators submitted their contributions, I worked on shaping 'This Endless Solitude' into a coherent whole," he says. "It was quite an intense process in itself. But the end result more than made up for the doubts that surfaced." Mastering was handled by his usual choice, Knut Prytz (ex-NECROPHAGIA).
The result refuses a genre label — jazz, trip hop, rock, metal, ambient and pop all surface — and it is only the opening instalment of a planned trilogy.
"Chapter I: This Endless Solitude" track listing:
- The Rhythm of Silence (7:06)
- My Salvation (5:27)
- Projections (3:20)
- Obsession Six (6:26)
- Reoccuring Dreams (6:31)
- Would You Take This Heart (5:50)
- Behind Me (4:48)
- This Endless Solitude (6:34)
Pre-order and stream: orcd.co/holissstiktheendlesssolitude