By Jim Barber
An artist who can take her own challenges, who can persevere through pain, who can demonstrate resilience, can channel her negative emotions to create art that not only acts as a therapeutic purge, but can also embolden, embrace and inspire others – well, folks, that’s a true artist.
Lyric Hollar, the frontwoman for melodic metal band Lyric Noel, creates music that is as intensely personal as it is aggressively fierce. Her voice can transform effortlessly from songbird to demonic harpy and back, building an insistent dynamism into every one of her performances and musical compositions.
Following the release of the truly cinematically epic and incendiary track ‘Blood in the Water’ last fall, Lyric Noel has unleashed the powerful new single and video for the brilliant and bombastic song, ‘Shades of Black,’ through Judge and Jury Records. Both songs are leading up to a full-length album which Hollar said may come towards the end of the year or in early 2027.
“We’re two songs deep with the label and we are currently in the process of getting ready to film the music video for the next one? I am not really allowed to give away much information about it, but I will say there’s going to be a pretty cool featured artist on this one. And it’s slated to be out in the late spring or early summer. That’s our tentative timeline anyway. In terms of an album, I can’t say yet. I just don’t know 100 per cent what the plans are but hopefully the announcement for the album will come out at least by the summertime. But it’s not finished yet. It’s very close, but not quite there,” Hollar said from her home in Texas, not far from Dallas, where she lives with her producer/guitarist/songwriter husband, Russell.
“I’m recording it with my husband. He’s the main producer and composer on everything. And the label allowed that to happen because Russell’s work is so good. We have our own studio at home, and we also have a brick-and-mortar studio in Argyle Texas, which is close to Fort Worth.”
Hollar grew up with a deep affinity of and talent for music, starting out with kiddie fare, transitioning to the pop music of her youth before later getting into the metal music that would inspire her to where she is today.
“I grew up around music in the house. My mother started me out on country music. She used to be a country singer, but I gave up on that as child. Then I became a big fan of the music from the Disney movies, especially from the Lion King and Pocahontas era. That was the beginning when I kind of discovered that I had a voice, so this was when I was about five. Then it progressed into pop music and the first band that I liked was NSYNC: I loved Justin Timberlake, and I still do to this day. I loved Britney Spears, but who didn’t love Britney in the 1990s and the 2000s, and also Christina Aguilera – those were my three. But then I discovered Nirvana and that’s where the progression into metal started to happen because I always felt like this oddball that never fit into a mold. I didn’t fit in with a lot of the other girls at school, and so eventually found myself in the Goth crowd and I knew that’s where I belonged. Since I got into that scene and that music, Kittie has been one of my favourite bands, and they’re Canadian, which is cool. I did know that. And I love Spiritbox too. One of my dreams is to get onstage with [Spiritbox frontwoman] Courtney Laplante and also Tatiana [Shmayluk] from Jinjer as well as Poppy. I doubt that will ever happen, but you never know.,” Hollar said, explaining that metal wasn’t the genre through which she embarked on her musical journey, but eventually came to understand that’s where she belonged.
“I was doing pop music and at one point in time I did a lot of blues music. I actually had an era where we were doing stuff that sounded like Dorothy. I pulled some of that stuff off the DSPs [digital streaming platforms] because it was confusing the algorithm and I need to be able to couple us with artists that we’re trying to tour with. I actually started with metal, then took a 10-year hiatus, and then I got back into music when I met Russell and we were doing blues rock and then we pivoted to metal and it changed everything, pretty quickly actually. And I realized I had a talent for it, including screaming. And let me just say, and this is a hot take, screaming is a skill. It is not a talent. It is not something you were born knowing how to do. I guess the talent part comes from when you learn to be able to seamlessly switch between screaming and your normal singing voice. It is actually not my favourite thing to do, believe it or not. It’s taken me a long time to do it and learn how to do it properly without hurting my voice. So I guess that’s where the talent part comes in. But really, it’s a skill that I’ve honed. It’s not something I was born knowing how to do. I was born with pitch. I was born with rhythm; I was born with being able to create melodies that was ingrained at birth. Screaming was something I taught myself how to do. I knew I had to do it to hang in this genre, plus I have so much aggression inside of me that needs to come out, so screaming is performed for me to know how to do.”
Hollar makes it abundantly and repeatedly clear that Lyric Noel, while it is her actual first and middle name, is a band, although a band with a centralized creative team. To be more accurate, it is a partnership, a life and artistic endeavor spearheaded by Hollar and her husband/collaborator Russell.
“I will say that I write the lyrics and I have, like, the artistic vision for this project, but Russell is the real brains behind everything. He is the one who writes and composes all the music that makes it a Lyric Noel piece. So, while that may be my moniker and the name that we go by, truthfully, he’s the reason why this project has a pulse, and I guess I am kind of the heart. Really, if it weren’t for him this project would not exist and if it weren’t for me, obviously this project would not exist. I’m not a solo artist. We’re a band. If you look at artists like Poppy and Nita Strauss and Dorothy, they go by their names too, but they’re a band,” she said.
“With the stuff that I’m writing about it took me a long time to be vulnerable with my husband. And it had nothing to do with him, because he was immediately like this breath of fresh air and positivity and support that I never ever had as a child. Well, I did with my grandparents but that’s a whole other story for another day. I didn’t have the best relationship with either one of my parents growing up. I still don’t, but Russell has been that kind of safety net for me. He was so patient with me through this whole process. He knew I could sing, and he knew it was something I wanted to do, so he just patiently pushes me without being aggressive always saying, ‘you can do it. You got this.’ Like, I don’t even know where this man came from – probably the sky. He’s just so awesome, and I think we’re so good for each other. I’m sure if you were talking to him, he’d say that he feels he’s pretty lucky too.”
Hollar also spoke glowingly of the other two members Lyric Noel, guitarist/songwriter Robert Gray and drummer Jerrin Castillo, who also handles the bulk of the backup vocals both on record and live.
“We’re fortunate because none of the band members are from out of town. Robbie Gray, our other guitar player, he’s 10 minutes down the road from us. He co-wrote ‘Blood in the Water’ [released in September of last year] and ‘Gravity’ [from their 2024 EP Sun Gazer], which are two of my favourites in our catalogue. Robbie’s fantastic. He’s just as talented a composer as Russell and they get along really well. I mean, Robbie was in our wedding, so he’s just great. And then Jerrin our drummer has been part of the band since the beginning,” she said.
“Funny story about Jerrin. I met him the day of the ‘Carol of the Bells’ video shoot. I didn’t know him, but Russell said, ‘I’ve got the perfect drummer.’ We didn’t have a drummer, but ‘Carol of the Bells,’ the first version we put out went viral, but we didn’t know how viral that song was going to go. It was so viral that it was like there was a requirement for us to do a full version and do a music video and release it. We needed a drummer for the video and we were talking to one guy but he wasn’t sure he could do what we were asking, that it was out of his skill set, which is fine. Every drummer is different. Every musician is different and that’s kind of how we found Jerrin. He showed up on the day of the video shoot, didn’t know me from Adam, but just dressed in this nice black button up as you see in the video. He just blew me away with his skill and his personality. I mean, he’s so cool, he’s like one of the guys and one of the girls at the same time. I love Jerrin. I can be on the phone with him for hours. He’s fantastic and he’s also my backup vocalist and he’s incredible at that.”
On the subject of ‘Carol of the Bells,’ the original Lyric Noel, metalized version of the traditional, song was released more than three years ago. Two years ago, Lyric Noel also recorded and released a video for another holiday classic, ‘Silent Night,’ again rocked up, but in a way that is incredibly compelling and imbued with gothic resonance and emotional intensity.
The original version of the song was an early 20th century Ukrainian carol entitled ‘Shchedryk’ written by composer Mykola Leontovych and meant to incorporate the style and tone of a traditional Ukrainian folk song. When updated with English lyrics in 1936 by American composer Peter Wilhousky, it became a staple throughout the English-speaking world, launching thousands of recorded versions, including Lyric Noel’s. It’s a double-edged sword in a sense, having a popular Christmas song, because it means it’s probably going to be on loads of holiday playlists for decades to come, but there’s always a chance that the popularity of the song means that the broader music consuming public, ONLY sees a band through the lens of that particular recording.
“I’m going to be honest. It kind of drives me nuts in a way because I don’t want to be known as the Queen of Christmas. I mean, Mariah Carey is the Queen of Christmas and she can keep the title. Actually I don’t really care all that much. I did make a parody video and shared it on my Instagram or my TikTok around Christmastime. It started with her video and then I come in and pushed it out of the way before we go into ‘Carol of the Bells.’ That video got like, millions of views. It’s just stupid. I’m like, ‘damn, I wish my original music would do that.’ But I hear that from a lot of artists where you’ve put all this work and heart and energy into your originals and it’s something goofy you do off the cuff that gets you all the attention,” she said, adding that another possible reason why the song has had such traction is because of the current geopolitical situation in eastern Europe where Ukraine has been under attack from Russia.
“After we recorded it, we did find out that the song is almost like the Ukrainian national anthem, which is crazy to me how things happened. We didn’t put two and two together at all that it was based on Ukrainian folk music and was like a second national anthem for them, and it just blew up online because it came out during the early days of the War with Russia and Ukraine. Russell actually got an email or message from the Ukrainian government and they wanted to add it to their national playlist, so that’s pretty cool.”
As stated above, the Lyric Noel phenomena started when the band’s well-produced, uniquely stylized and incomparably badass covers of songs by a wide swathe of artists and genres, from the likes of Butcher Babies, to Bishop Briggs (‘River’), Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill,’ and a truly haunting cover of Danny Elfman’s ‘Sally’s Song’ from the Tim Burton film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, went viral, drawing attention to the band’s musicianship, ability to craft interesting, dynamic arrangements, as well as Hollar’s magnetic presence and dominating vocal prowess.
The original songs released thus far over the past half decade have been of a similar music vibe, but of course immersed in the extra level of passion, energy and commitment one gets from a performance of music derived solely from the artist’s own heart, mind, soul and spirit. These include the breathtaking ‘Metamorphosis,’ the indelibly melodic ‘One and the Same,’ as well as the aforementioned ‘Shades of Black,’ and ‘Blood in the Water.’
The husband-and-wife creative dynamic means that the Hollars are generally on the same psychological and musical wavelength and just ‘know’ how to put songs together that meld Russell’s technical mastery and compositional skills with Lyric’s mind-bending ability as a lyrical storyteller and incendiary vocal outpourings.
“Russell starts the music off but then my brain will start firing off even just words or tiny phrases and I feel I’ve got to write them down, no matter how silly it sounds, because it’s going to sound great later. While I am doing that Russell will just pop up with these amazing pieces of music and I’m like, ‘oh my goodness gracious, that will fit with this, or fit with those other things.’ Then there’s pieces of music that he writes that don’t resonate right away, but usually do later. We have ten music beds [bed tracks] that don’t even have lyrics yet, but I’m really excited to write to those. I’ve been trying to write since I’ve been in recovery [she recently had surgery] and I’ve written a few little things, but I’m so picky. I won’t just put anything into an original song,” Lyric said.
“The people that I look up to, the lyricists I admire: if you listen to Kurt Cobain, or Vessel from Sleep Token, if you listen to Courtney LaPlante, they’re very introspective and you can tell that they put a lot of thought into what they were trying to say. So that’s really important to me to write very similarly, leaving it open to interpretation so that as many people as possible can relate to it. It’s a fine line for it to be too introspective and making it difficult for people to understand and identify with, without being so simple that it feels like a toddler wrote it. And when I am writing, I have to be by myself to write lyrics because I’m so critical of myself. Believe me, when I sit down with Russell and I show him my stuff, I’m like, ‘I’m so embarrassed, I don’t want to show you,’ and he has to practically hold my hand and reassure me that it’s going to be okay. I’m getting better and better at it as time goes by. He’ll write something and he’ll just show it to me and 99.9 per cent of the time I am just in love with it right away, and occasionally he’ll make some changes based on my suggestions and how they fit the lyrics I am writing, but every time, every song we do, it’s like he gets me and if I tell him I want something to sound a certain way, he just does it. I don’t know how he does it, but he always makes it work.
“One thing he does is, he doesn’t give me melody ideas, but more like cadences. I tell him that I’ve got these words, but how can I make them work? I ask him to show me a cadence from the music, and he will just come up with one and it works. That happens about 50 per cent of the time, and the other times I’ll come up with the cadences on my own. It really just depends on the song. He writes very technical music, but it’s also easy to understand. We’re just in sync that way. Sometimes if I’m really trying to write a song and I get freaking stuck, I will take songs that I love and rewrite lyrics to it and then I use that as my guide or my template. I did that with the Sleep Token song ‘Caramel’ [which Lyric Noel also covered in a video]. I used the cadence in that song to help me write ‘Shades of Black.’”
The songs crafted thus far for the debut Lyric Noel album have been drafted utilizing a brilliantly innovative thematic reference point. Each song utilizes the imagery of a species of flower, and each species is representative of a particular form of mental illness. It is a subtle but innovative way of creating both awareness and a deeper understanding of mental illness not only for the broader community to become more informed and empathetic, but more significantly, so that those who live with, and often suffer tremendously, with various forms of mental illness, will feel heard and alone. This is particularly the case with the powerful song ‘Shades of Black,’ mentioned above, which Lyric Noel recently released as a single and cinematically potent video.
“I feel like ‘Shades of Black’ was meant to be an outreach to everybody. All of these songs on this album are a reflection of mental illness. I was thinking, what if mental illness had a personality? What would it look like in every song? So it has a flower associated with it and that flower represents what that mental illness is. ‘Shades of Black’ represents the black dahlia flower. I have borderline personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder tends to be misdiagnosed all of the time for many other things, because a lot of doctors don’t seem to know a whole lot about it. I spent my entire childhood being misdiagnosed, until I met this doctor when I was in my late teens who said, ‘no, no, your daughter has this.’ So the song is meant to represent every aspect of this particular illness which does get misdiagnosed a lot. And it’s about what happens when you’re pushed to your limit and how you’re going to react.”
Music that enlightens, that elevates, that helps people no longer feel alone, that is cathartic and which gives voice, and power and expression to the darker thoughts we all have, to the way in which mental illness can derail one’s life and breed feelings of fear and hopelessness and anger – Lyric Noel’s music does all of this and more. And in Hollar’s mind, it is the universality of music and the way it can aid in healing others – in the way that it has helped her heal – which motivates her to keep ploughing the depths of her own psyche and experiences.
“It’s about raising awareness for other people, not so much for me. It’s for other people because, although I do feel like this music is for me in some respects and how I dealt with my own internal battles, it’s more about other people finding themselves in the music, and I want them to use it to help themselves. You know, I can’t wait for the day when somebody will walk up to me at a show and say, ‘your music stopped me from making the biggest mistake of my whole life,’ or something like that,” she said.
“That’s kind of how I feel about what Sleep Token has done for me. Part of his [frontman Vessel’s] message is ‘I do this for you. You’re the reason I do this.’ Although he doesn’t actually directly talk to the audience when they play shows, they take these instrumental breaks in between songs where there’s a voice that comes over the PA that sounds like it’s been electronically changed, which I’m assuming is him, but he changed it to make it sound different. That voice talks about ‘I’m nothing without this music. I’m nothing without you guys.’ And I want my music to have that sort of impact, because I’m coming from a similar place myself.
“It does scare me a little bit, being so open, and revealing this part of myself because there’s a lot of nasty people out there too who are not really responsive to this sort of subject. That’s part of the paradox, I guess, of having mental illness, in that it makes you so creative, but at the same time, so vulnerable and open to all sorts of hate. A lot of artists that I really admire, I actually came to found out had mental illness, like bipolar disorder. I really love Marilyn Manson. I loved Kurt Cobain, and they had bipolar. And that makes sense to me.”
With new music coming over the next weeks and months, planning for a possible tour later in the year is already underway, although Hollar said it’s getting more and more difficult, more and more expensive, and more and more frustrating trying to book shows and tour in a manner that not only helps build awareness of the band, but also doesn’t slam the pocketbook at the end of the day.
“We do want to tour but we have to somehow figure out how to make it a reality financially. So that means finding the right booking agency and things like that. But this is a challenge we are ready to face pretty soon,” she said.
For more information, visit https://linktr.ee/lyricnoel.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
