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On “Veridream,” Scott Holiday Trades Certainty for Curiosity

By Kath Galasso on July 17, 2026

Scott Holiday has spent much of his career playing guitar with conviction. His work in Rival Sons relies on attack, tone, timing, and the ability to make a riff feel inevitable. “Veridream,” the first single from his new HOL1D4Y project, is built around a different instinct: curiosity.

The song does not rush to establish itself. Its opening textures gradually form a loose psychological landscape, with synthesizers, drums, and guitar interacting in a way that keeps the center slightly unstable. Holiday’s voice enters without announcing a new persona, sounding thoughtful and occasionally detached.

That subtle entrance matters because TOPOLOGY, the debut HOL1D4Y album due September 25, marks his first time singing lead on his own recordings. A guitarist stepping behind a microphone can easily become the headline, but Holiday treats the voice as another component of the arrangement. It sits alongside the fuzz, vintage keys, and rhythms instead of dominating them.

“Veridream” is an invented word for the longing to reach a truer self that appears only in dreams. It is a fitting subject for an artist testing a new identity after decades within a highly recognizable band. Still, the track avoids presenting HOL1D4Y as a complete personal rebirth. The connection to Holiday’s past remains audible, particularly in the weight and grain of his guitar sound.

What has changed is the surrounding architecture. Jesse Nason’s synthesizers bring a sense of suspended space, while Michael Miley’s drumming stays deep in the pocket. Sections seem to open, fold, and reconnect, echoing the album title’s interest in forms that can change shape while retaining an underlying relationship.

Topology is commonly associated with mathematics, but Holiday applies the concept to human experience. The album looks toward love, separation, technology, social cohesion, awareness, and the patterns that affect perception. Dr. Dylan Trigg, a philosophy researcher at Central European University, describes it as an inquiry into the unity beneath an apparently tangled world.

That explanation could make the record sound more academic than “Veridream” actually feels. The song is cerebral in concept, but its pleasures are immediate: a strong drum groove, layers of warm analog sound, melodic guitar details, and a chorus-like lift that stays slightly elusive.

The project began through improvisation and routine. Holiday recorded short pieces each day in his home studio, then noticed that several sketches appeared to belong together. Miley supplied drums, Nason contributed keys, and Holiday gradually shaped the recordings into finished compositions.

A cycling accident interrupted the process and left Holiday facing months of recovery. During that period, the music began to change in his imagination. Tracks intended as instrumentals started to suggest language, and the decision to add lyrics became tied to his willingness to occupy a new role.

There is an understandable temptation to hear “Veridream” entirely through the lens of that accident. Yet the song does not carry itself like a recovery anthem. It is stranger, quieter, and less resolved. Its subject is possibility, but possibility here includes confusion and distance.

That measured quality makes the track a promising first chapter. HOL1D4Y seems less interested in issuing a grand declaration than in exploring what can happen when an experienced musician allows his process to become unfamiliar again.