It might’ve been a Monday, but at Irving Plaza, Sunday service came a day late. HOLYWATR preached to a sold-out room in support of their latest record, Deo Gratias, last Monday, November 2, and I’d be lying if I said this hadn’t been one of my most anticipated concerts of the year. After discovering the group last year at Vans Warped Tour Orlando, where a packed media lounge schedule unfortunately kept me from catching their set, I became even more entranced by the record after finding Jutes among its production credits — another artist who has spent much of this year at the top of my listening charts. From there, I was impatiently awaiting the next tour announcement, refreshing social media every other day as though a flyer might materialize through sheer devotion.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Los Angeles-based post-hardcore quarter, there is no better time to become baptized in their distortion. A sold-out New York City room is a convincing testament on its own, but the packed venues nationwide suggest their following is only continuing to swell, and they aren’t lingering in the afterglow of Deo Gratias for long. Their recently released single, “green room,” already hints at another chapter stirring beyond the sanctuary doors.
Oftentimes, opening acts offer a moment of discovery, but on Monday, Mercury felt less like an introduction and more like the opening passage of the sermon unfolding beneath the LED. As I wove through the crowd later in the evening, I heard numerous attendees mention that they had come specifically for Mercury, whose moody, shoegaze-steeped landscape seemed cut from the same atmospheric cloth as the headliner’s. For those of us hearing them for the first time, it took little more than a chord to fall beneath their spell. It’s the kind of music that slowly closes around you, a haze you don’t realize you’ve disappeared into until the final note dissolves and the room comes back into focus. As someone who reaches for this genre in my daily shuffle, Mercury has now become a familiar presence in my rotation, a name I now eagerly offer when someone asks for recommendations. With a powerhouse female vocalist as the architect of the sound, they might still be unfamiliar to some listeners, but they are far too compelling to let pass unnoticed.
At 9 p.m., HOLYWATR stepped up to the altar, and the crowd answered with devotion. Immediately, I noticed the simplicity of the stage design. For a band whose music carries so many layers and shifting cadences, it felt almost contradictory to see the platform so bare, without even a guitar stand interrupting the open space. Yet the longer they played, the more it made sense: The songs needed no gliding. Flashing lights were more than enough when the music itself could fill the room this completely; each passage offered another detail to catch, another texture to lose yourself inside. For one of their first sold-out Manhattan rooms as a headliner on a bill, it felt fitting that the sound remained the center of attention, the very heart of the gathering. Lead singer Patrick Walsh made full use of the space around, pouncing, jumping, and headbanging with the crowd through every verse, chorus, and instrumental stretch, leaving hardly an inch of that open stage untouched.
The setlist carried us through the entirety of Deo Gratias, in my opinion, a no-skip record that deserves to be heard from front ot back, its choral textures threading through the songs like incense drifting between pews. We didn’t receive the album in its recorded order, but the material still landed with the weight that makes the studio version so consuming. Opening with “Give Me A Show” and its Latin introduction established the atmosphere without any hesitation: the invocation had barely begun before the room surrendered. The band also reached beyond the record, returning to songs longtime listeners had been waiting to hear while making space for their latest offering. Alongside the album tracks came “Hiding In Plain Sight,” “fade,” “make it hard to steer,” “God can’t save what’s mine,” “winter pine,” “green room,” “ashes,” “nail polish,” and the crowd-pleasing closer, “loose ends,” the song that first introduced me to HOLYWATR. It was a carefully balanced collision of recent material and familiar favorites, with each selection giving the crowd another reason to spend whatever chaos they had been saving.
That attention to the audience extended beyond the setlist, too, without ever feeling rehearsed for the sake of a reaction. We are all accustomed to hearing an artist demand more crowd surfers, but Patrick made the challenge specific to Irving Plaza, asking us to break the venue’s record and cheekily suggesting, by the first song, that New York could do better. As bodies began traveling overhead in greater numbers, he also recognized when the exhilaration needed a little restraint, pausing to address crowd safety after someone became overwhelmed in the front row. For a band whose reach has expanded so rapidly through social media, it makes sense that some listeners might arrive without knowing how intense a post-hardcore show can become. Taking the time to explain how to navigate that movement, rather than simply calling for more of it, made his care for the room feel sincere. He was asking us to give everything to the music without forgetting the people standing beside us.
Near the halfway point, Patrick called for an all-girls mosh pit, another simple gesture that made the invitation to participate feel a little wider. Men had occupied much of the pit throughout the evening, giving themselves over to each song in flurries of kicks, punches, and spins, but when the girls took over, the space became a dance party from the row section to the back. We streamed in from the barricade and the soundboard, finding one another somewhere in the middle until strangers were laughing and moving together like friends who had arrived side by side. Afterward, phones passed between hands as we exchanged numbers, unwilling to let the connection end quite so quickly. Then one girl shouted that she had lost her shoe, and the center of the crowd opened into a collective search party. When the missing boot finally emerged, we cheered and jumped as though the reunion belonged to every one of us. It was a small, wonderfully ordinary moment beneath all that thunder, and exactly the kind that reminds me why being present in a room full of people still matters.
By far, my favorite song of the night was “Wake Up,” arguably my favorite on Deo Gratias, although hearing the record live makes choosing just one considerably harder. The studio version already rests on piano, with gentle atmospheric layers suspended behind it, but the live arrangement brought that intimacy even closer: a piano was wheeled onto the right side of the stage, and Patrick sat down alone, letting his voice carry the weight the full band had held moments before. The sermon quieted into a confession. His range was fully exposed, every shift in delivery given room to linger, and let me tell you, anyone not yet convinced by the recordings needs to hear “Wake Up” in that setting. It was transcendent, and I desperately need a live release to return to the moment instead of trying to hold onto it through memory alone.
Elsewhere, when the entire band reverberated through the room, the impact was seismic. The guitar solos were precise without losing their fire, the drums held a relentless pulse, and while Patrick’s voice is unmistakable, the musicianship of Chandler, Ice, and Z deserves just as much praise. Together, they sound like a band with well over a decade of shared instinct behind them, rather than roughly half of that.
After a night like this, it is difficult to imagine HOLYWATR remaining in rooms like Irving Plaza for much longer. When I found my friends later in the evening — people who hadn’t known a single song and had come out for another friend’s birthday — they echoed the same feeling: This is a band with the potential to reach the heights of Bring Me The Horizon or My Chemical Romance. That is no small comparison for this scene and genre of music, but watching them hold a sold-out room through both the crushing passages and the vulnerability of a song like “Wake Up,” I understood exactly where it came from. With their current momentum and appetite for releasing new music, I don’t think that growth will take long. An opportunity to experience HOLYWATR in a room this intimate is worth every penny, whether you arrive knowing every word or find yourself converted halfway through the first song. For now, the altar is still this close, and I wouldn’t wait until the congregation outgrows the walls.
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