Vlad Holiday just released his debut album, My Favorite Drug, diving into a lot of dark subject matter, but showing Holiday as a character very much so in the middle of his journey. He openly sings about low moments in his mental health, substance abuse, the thin line between sanity and insanity, and cyclical patterns of familial abuse, all to place an element of love into life’s heaviest topics.
Vlad Holiday has always had to romanticize darkness in order to make it palatable. The down-tempo, lo-fi rock artist had to flee Romania as a child, then finding a home in NYC and now in Nashville; the influence of feeling like an outsider is across all he creates.
After releasing music for years, Holiday never envisioned himself wanting to release a full-length album. But as he worked on the songs that now build out today’s debut album My Favorite Drug, the threads that held a larger story together couldn’t be ignored. A vintage gear addict, Holiday recorded most of the album at his home studio.
Taking inspiration from the 1950s and 60s, spaghetti Westerns, jazz lounges, hip-hop beats, Twin Peaks, and drenching it all in reverb, Holiday’s debut has no shortage of notable collaborations. Joined by Kacey Musgraves on the mischievous and sultry “I Don’t Wanna Party Anymore,” the duo seeks to end the cycle of crashing hard after partying and being sucked right back in by an enabling partner. And on “Closer,” which was co-written by Cage The Elephant’s Matt Shultz, the careful listener can hear Shultz’s voice singing the “ah ah ah ah” hook and some repeated “closers” in the outro.
“This record all revolves around my mental health journey,” shared Holiday. “There was no vision when I started it. I was just using writing for therapeutic reasons and never planned to write a full album. But as it started to formulate, it became clear to me that these songs should be one body of work. Writing the album helped me get through some incredibly intense times and saved me in a way. It’s definitely extremely personal and emotional for me.”
Are you going to give Vlad Holiday’s debut, My Favorite Drug, a spin?
