This Is Lorelei review: Holo Boy – Beautiful, sad songs from a new pearl of the US alternative scene | dew

AOne half of the Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes, Nate Amos makes left-wing pop music that sounds hyper-modern: wry, meme-y lyricism; Post-ironic genre hopping; The kind of desolate chaos and tonal jumble that characterizes social media feeds. However, the band was actually on hiatus for seven years before breaking out in 2023. Amos’s solo project This Is Lorelei lasted much longer, only gaining proper traction with last year’s belated debut album Box for Buddy, Box for Star.

Now Amos is capitalizing on this recent momentum with another release, this time a collection of re-recorded songs pulled from Bandcamp’s extensive back catalogue. In contrast to his production at WFYE, these tracks are gentle folk-rock numbers that deal with honeyed melancholy. They tend to be brief and narratively vague, casting fleeting glimpses of regret, disappointment and darkness (“You don’t want to know what my dreams are,” he claims in “But You Just Woke Me Up”). His most obvious stylistic counterpart is indie rocker Alex G, but while Amos can’t rival him in lyrical punch, he can match his knack for pleasingly shifting detail: see the naming of the band’s chunky pop-punk line or the bright guitar riff on Dreams Away.

This Is Lorelei isn’t quite as compelling as Amos’s other project (whose soul can be detected on Mouth Man, an eclectic rush of deadpan phrases and strange synth blasts over a four-on-the-floor beat), but this collection of sweet, melancholic acoustic fare is certainly enjoyable enough to warrant an opportunistic repackaging.