Upset is Dork's go-to playlist for the best new heavy music, where urgent guitars and boundary-pushing bands meet moments that hit hard.
In October 2025, Holding Absence were overtaken on Spotify by a band that does not exist. Bleeding Verse had been running for about two months, cited Holding Absence among its influences, and was generated rather than written by anybody. It hit 897,349 monthly listeners. Holding Absence, a decade into the version of this that involves vans, being largely skint and having a favourite service station, had 847,638. The imitation went on to do more than thirty million streams before the numbers started falling away again.
Lucas Woodland has had the best part of a year to work out how he feels about that. “There will be a massive pushback to AI, now. There’s no denying it,” he says. “In fact, if that whole AI palaver had happened to us sooner, I’m sure this album would’ve been much more jagged and uncomfortable!”
Their new album already had a robot of its own. Y4-BBO is a small, forlorn machine who appears on merch, in videos, and on the sleeve of album four, ‘Modern Life Is Lonely’. The helmet was built by the people responsible for the Cybermen. He has his own plushie. On the artwork he is reaching towards cherry blossom and a blue sky that turn out, on inspection, to be playing on an enormous LED screen.
“There’s a multitude of reasons here,” says Lucas. “The first one honestly stemmed from merch designing on album three. So much of the inspiration that cropped up was from Japanese Anime, but more importantly ‘mascot’ culture. So when album four started to materialise, it made total sense to have a mascot.”
The second reason is structural. “We wanted Y4 to be a foil, narratively. The whole album is about embracing humanity and nature, and I felt like having a silly little robot character on every shirt and in every video would sort of be a polarising juxtaposition.” The third is the one that explains the other two. “Most importantly though, we wanted to have fun on this album. So, let’s make a robot.”
None of this, it should be said, was a reaction to anything. The departure had been promised three years earlier, in very small print. On the cover of 2023’s ‘The Noble Art of Self Destruction’ there is a marking that reads 3/3, which the band’s more forensic fans clocked immediately and everyone else did not.
“The 3/3 on the bottom of our last record’s artwork was us telling the world that we wanted a departure,” Lucas says, “and committing to it was tough. Lots of pushing against our instincts, lots of failing at new ideas, etc. But, for the first time in a while, we felt that beautiful feeling that can only be encountered outside of your comfort zone.”
Work started in 2023 and did not properly get going until late 2024, by which point the band were a trio, drummer Ashley Green having left in October of that year after eight years. What had run out, along with the line-up, was a certain kind of subject matter. Holding Absence built their following on Lucas turning himself inside out in public, and he is fairly clear-eyed about how much of that is left.
“The first three albums were almost masochistically introspective, and I really think I purged a lot of myself for those albums... So, this time around, it almost felt like I had nothing new to say, in that regard.”
The alternative was the rest of it. “I also think that it’s impossible to not have an opinion on the world at large these days. I feel the doom when I pick up my phone. And I pick up my phone way too often. Same as everybody else.”
The title came out of that, along with the thing he actually wanted to say with it. “I just think that so much of life has become oxymoronic, and loneliness was a real totem of that reality. We are SO connected and SO alone, it’s jarring.” The way out of it, he reckons, is the album itself. “I do think one of the other things that drew me towards this narrative was knowing that I’m not alone in my loneliness... I think if you can relate to this album, in a way, you’ve almost fixed the problem. Music will always be the greatest glue.”
“We spent so much time saying, ‘That’s what we’d normally do, let’s do the opposite’”
Musically, the method was simple enough to fit on a Post-it. “We genuinely spent SO much time in the studio saying ‘that’s what we’d normally do, let’s do the opposite’. That was SO creatively liberating.”
It helped that they knew precisely what they were doing the opposite of. “We know what the fortified structure of a HA song sounds like now,” Lucas says. “This time around, experimenting with songs became a bit of a sandbox! We were just playing, having fun and seeing what would fit into this mould we’ve become so comfortable with.” He is careful not to make it sound tidy. “Like I said earlier though, this album didn’t come without failure! Finding a unique sound usually comes straight after finding a lot of... bad... sounds.”
Then there is how it was actually made. The songs were pulled apart and rebuilt. Lucas spent hours chopping and editing samples. The guitar amps were digital. The screams on the title track were tracked months after the fact, back in Cardiff. And for a couple of weeks, visa problems meant the band could not be in the same country as each other, so they recorded over Discord.
“That was sort of insane,” he says, with what reads like considerable understatement. “All that to say, we’re really happy with the outcome and are so grateful Dan Braunstein is such a pro, and a bro. That process could’ve really hindered a lot of producers’ output.”
A band arguing for human connection, making a record about its absence, in separate houses, over a chat app used mostly by teenagers to play video games. Braunstein kept the whole thing upright.
All of which brings us back to the robot, and to what Lucas thinks is the actual answer to the thing that beat them on Spotify. It is not, as it happens, better technology.
“The answer to your question is humanity,” he says. “It’s extra effort. It’s emotion. It’s nonsense. It’s all the things that a robot wouldn’t conceive to do, and I think it’s all going to come at a time where music is getting too cookie-cutter, anyway. I can feel that our culture has a timer hanging above its head, and I think our every intention is to continue making all our future albums more human than ever.”
There is a version of this album cycle in which that reads as posturing, and the reason it doesn’t is that he seems to have stopped caring how it lands. “This is the album where I really learned how to feel creative fulfilment without validation,” he says. “I, for the first time ever, really don’t mind if people hate this album. We had such a genuine blast making it, and stretching the sonic palette in ways I don’t think many bands have been able to. I want to hold that candle up for the next release and keep going.”
He is curious about one thing only, and it isn’t the reviews. “I’m most curious to hear people’s favourite tracks! There are some quintessential HA classics like Whisper, Reanimate and Kyoto... New school bangers like MLIL, Heaven and Lucid... Even the interludes are genuinely exciting to me. I think the main takeaway from this album is seeing what holes we are encouraged to dig deeper into for album 5.”
Eleven years in, the job has not got old. Asked what still excites him about making a Holding Absence record, he does not pause over it. “Oh, what doesn’t? I get to pour my diary into a paint bucket, splash it all over a canvas and show it to the world for three years. It’s the most beautiful job in the world and I’m doing everything I can to get another 10 years out of it.”
The next three of those are already spoken for. ‘Modern Life Is Lonely’ arrives on 18th September, three weeks later than planned, held up by the physical manufacturing, which for a band whose last album went to Number 8 on the sales chart and Number 67 on the main one is not a trivial delay. The North American co-headline run with Arm’s Length starts the day after it lands. Then November brings a UK and European arena tour with Enter Shikari, taking in Cardiff’s Utilita Arena on the 14th and two nights at Alexandra Palace on the 20th and 21st. “They’re a genuine all-time favourite of ours,” Lucas says. “And Ally Pally for two nights!”
For now, Y4-BBO reaches towards a sky made of LEDs on the album sleeve. Somebody built that helmet; somebody else signed off the plushie. It is a colossal amount of bother to go to for a joke, and the thing that overtook them on Spotify last October would never have bothered. DORK
Taken from the October 2026 issue of Dork. Holding Absence’s album ‘Modern Life Is Lonely’ is out 18th September.
