After being in a band for over a decade, Hollerado singer/guitarist Menno Versteeg has finally discovered the perfect remedy for taking the stress out of the recording process: Just break up.
Hollerado’s fourth album, Retaliation Vacation, once again finds the band positioned in the center of a Venn diagram comprising ’70s power-pop, ’80s New Wave, and ’90s bubble-grunge. But in light of the news that the Toronto-via-Ottawa quartet would be packing it in at the end of 2019, the record sees them more eager to stray outside the lines, both musically and lyrically. In their case, the decision to deep-six the band has, ironically, invested them with renewed vim and vitality.
“We’re a band that’s always lived and died by the radio in terms of finding fans,” Versteeg tells Apple Music. “When we were writing our last record [2017’s Born Yesterday], we were like, ‘Do we have two singles on here that radio’s going to play?’ And we didn’t stop writing the record until we did. With this one, we stopped caring, but in a good way. We wanted to say whatever we felt like and do whatever we wanted. We don’t give a fuck about anything now!”
By Versteeg’s own admission, Retaliation Vacation doesn’t “reinvent the Hollerado wheel.” But in sharp contrast to signature feel-good sing-alongs like “Juliette,” Retaliation Vacation sees Versteeg wading into social commentary: The arms-aloft anthem “Speechless” is written from the perspective of a father who lost a child in a school shooting, while the cheeky, almost rap-like verses of “Days Without Sugar” tee up an indictment of Western gluttony and ambivalence.
“It’s definitely less of a party-funtime record than the Hollerado of old,” Versteeg says. “I like Hollerado to be all about good times and confetti and explosions, and serve as a little bit of a departure from reality. But the songs that were coming out of us for this record felt almost a little too heavy for this project.”
To bring a little levity to these topical tracks, Versteeg enlisted a local school choir he sourced via Google search. (“We didn’t want the parents and kids to see where we actually record, so we got a really nice, expensive studio for a day—and now they have a totally wrong view of what an indie band recording process looks like.”) But on Retaliation Vacation, such decorative embellishments ultimately serve to reinforce the thematic concerns of the record, with the kids giving voice to the social ills of a world they’ll eventually inherit. And if Retaliation Vacation makes no explicit mention of Hollerado’s impending demise, certain sonic details underscore the air of finality. As the funky jangle disco of the closing “A Little Touch of Madness” cruises out toward the sunset in a ripple of overlapping guitar solos, the song is gradually sucked into a dubbed-out abyss, and we’re treated to the sound of a band slowly disintegrating right before our ears.
“We started out as a band with no expectations at all,” Versteeg says. “We were just four people jamming. And we were total compulsive noodlers, to our own detriment—all our career, we had to rein in our noodling tendencies. So for that song, we were just like, ‘Fuck it! This is our last song, on our last record—noodle time!'”