I had been trying to figure out who Holding was before I invited them to come into the FBi studio, scouring the internet for any information, but they’re so incognito, I just had to have them on the show. The project has had a fair bit of airplay on FBi Radio recently - tracks with these intimate, heavy-limbed frequencies, reverberating guitars, bass guitar that grumbles, pumping under under the floorboards, and vocals so layered I genuinely thought there was a cast of collaborators, or at least a whole band behind them.
There isn't. Holding is Esther Olalere - a 24-year-old artist who grew up in Canberra, moved to Sydney around three or four years ago, and has built the project largely alone. Every vocal part I was hearing was Esther. The guitars, too, which come from a relationship that started in high-school music class, learning Nirvana and Arctic Monkeys covers with friends.
“I didn’t even know that you could do that,” they told me, talking about first seeing people in their early twenties making music in their bedrooms online. To them, music-making seemed expensive and out of reach. Esther started producing at 16, then stepped away for uni and work, then came back to it last year. Since then, Holding has been steadily putting out singles that feel remarkably together and intentional for a project still finding its feet.
Holding talks about their songs sitting somewhere between love and anxiety. I feel they tilt toward devotion and worship. They admit they some of the tracks are more plainly about the fear of leaving the house. Most of the time it's both.
On “Sun In My Eyes”, Esther described the title as that moment when you are looking at someone you love so intensely that it obscures your vision. There might be something you need clarity on, but the brightness of it gets in the way. That push and pull is all through Holding’s music. Holding prioritises guitar driven melody, rhythm and sound before the lyrics, but somehow the lyrics break your heart as if it was done just as intentionally.
Esther starts almost every song with guitar. A lead part comes first, then lyrics, then the rest gets built around the feeling. This comes from the way they listen to music - often for what it does to the body rather than for a literal explanation. “Some of my favourite songs, I don’t even know what they’re about,” they said. “I just listen because it makes me feel a certain way.”
This matters in the world of intentionally raw and DIY music Holding is creating. The vocals are hazy, despite being recorded in a studio clean, the higher frequencies intentionally cut back, the edges are rubbed down until a track feels less polished and more lived-in. It is not lo-fi simply for the sake of aesthetics. It’s to give their tracks a strange physical weight - a deep hum that writhes under your skin.
There are clear reference points - Nirvana, the internet, Teen Suicide, the Tumblr-era music that made an already difficult school day feel even more dramatic - but Holding isn’t a nostalgia project. Esther says that queerness is important to how they understand the songs because the writing comes from their own life, but they also want people to take what they need from it. This generosity, flexibility and openness, is part of what makes Holding such a beautiful project. You can hear what you want to. I hear the queer devotion, they cite singing about envy that can exist inside queer relationships and the anxiety that sits beside love rather than cancelling it out.
Holding is not playing live yet, although they should be. Esther played around Canberra as a teenager, but has been waiting until there are enough songs and enough clarity around what Holding is so they can build a show properly. They are up to seven releases now. The tracks might not feel cohesive enough to Esther yet, but they do to me and I think if you give it a listen, you’d probably agree.
Their dream venues / events to play at are the Sydney Opera House and Coachella. I, the chaos monster I am, made them say both out loud in the studio, as a manifestation and because I think they’re words they should get use to saying.