This year must have been one hell of a ride for Nate Amos. He kicked off 2025 touring his official solo debut, 2024’s acclaimed Box for Buddy, Box for Star. Barely three months later, he and Water From Your Eyes bandmate Rachel Brown dropped the also-acclaimed It’s a Beautiful Place. Not even a week out from the conclusion of that tour, Amos brings us Holo Boy, his second LP as This Is Lorelei. One imagines he wouldn’t have had time to breathe, much less to go through his extensive back catalog and re-record 10 highlights—but somehow he did.
And while Amos’ efforts to flesh out his selection of early cuts are valiant, what’s most impressive about Holo Boy is how breezy and self-assured it sounds. Few of these songs were intended to live together originally, but it still feels like Amos is coasting in a sweet spot; his sense of humor and ear for hooks shine through. Might as well call it Now That’s What I Call Lorelei!
Holo Boy specifically revisits Lorelei tracks dating from 2014-2021, a period when Amos was mostly spitballing EPs and singles on Bandcamp; back then, Lorelei was more like a “demo idea sandbox,” in his words, than an official solo project. But as Lorelei evolved and gained traction, Amos wanted to reexamine his older material in a new light. Where Box for Buddy intentionally experiments with varied production styles, Holo Boy takes a more holistic, integrative approach to reimagining earlier tracks. Both the tinny, slowcore-influenced sounds (like the title track) and straight-up power-pop tunes (“But You Just Woke Me Up”) become bolder and shinier as Amos cranks up the vocals and guitars and places his songwriting center stage.
He’s got ironic deflection down to a science, knowing when to tug the heartstrings and when to snip them (remember “But a loser never wins/And I’m a loser, always been”?). Holo Boy’s languid, swaggering reinterpretations bring a new confidence to the humorous self-effacement that’s endemic to the Lorelei universe, even suggesting Amos’ compassion for the person he was at the time he originally recorded them. On the original “I Can’t Fall,” quavering strings and breathy falsetto imbue a jaunty melody with unshakeable anxiety; on this re-recording, though, Amos croons in his lower register, and the orchestral swell, richer than ever, pulls the Beach Boys lever. Fuller guitars and clearer vocals on “Dreams Away” bring vital force to a song that previously conveyed mostly resignation: Singing “I’ve been sleeping all my life/And now I gotta wake up,” he sounds actually excited about the prospect.
Some tracks don’t get as drastic a makeover. “SF & GG” and “Money Right Now,” both originally from a 2021 single, benefit from a couple instrumental flourishes that reveal more twinkle behind the eyes, but they sound fuzz-shorn rather than wholly revamped. “Mouth Man” is arguably the one song that shouldn’t have been cleaned up: The distorted, atonal vocal melodies, piano chords, and inexplicably awesome clanging that created such tightly controlled chaos in the original feel slapdash when they’re sanded down.
But when Amos hams it up, it just works: On lead single “Name the Band,” originally a jangly, lightweight affair, he puts some bass in his voice and beefs up the boy-band guitars to head-bopping effect. And by letting his voice come to the forefront of “This Is a Joke,” the blasé act falls to the wayside in lieu of undeniably charming vulnerability.
Holo Boy doesn’t go out of its way to experiment or provoke, but its emphasis on reinterpretation is strangely moving, particularly at this point in Amos’ career. He’s spoken at length about his recent sobriety, about reevaluating his expectations for his solo work, and about how, pre-Box for Buddy, he approached Lorelei as something like a tongue-in-cheek study on singer-songwriter tropes. On Holo Boy, Amos sounds like he’s found genuine joy in taking This Is Lorelei seriously: ready to poke fun at being a singer-songwriter and to whole-heartedly affirm its importance.
