Since their first transmission in 2018, Blackwater Holylight have proven themselves fluent in a musical language that speaks most clearly when words fall short—when sorrow spills over into sublimity, when a song feels like a spell, and when contrast becomes communion.

Across three full-length albums and their latest EP, If You Only Knew, the Portland now LA - based band has become synonymous with a heavy-lidded intensity, channeling grief, grace, and grandeur in equal measure. Doom, deathgaze, hard rock, shoegaze—genre signifiers swirl around their work, but none can quite pin down the ache and bloom at its core.

Led by founding member Sunny Faris (bass, guitar, vocals), Blackwater Holylight is currently composed of Mikayla Mayhew (guitar, bass), Eliese Dorsay (drums), Sarah McKenna (synths), and returning guest Camille Gettz (violin). Together, they form something more akin to a collective exhale than a traditional rock band, a dynamic organism bound together by intuition and instinct.

Their most recent release, If You Only Knew, is a four-song meditation on movement and memory, where gauzy shoegaze textures meet cavernous doom riffs, and vulnerability is rendered not as weakness but as raw voltage. It’s a hinge point, a glimmering prologue to what’s next.

Now, with their forthcoming full-length, written and recorded by Faris, Mayhew, Dorsay, and McKenna, Blackwater Holylight enters a new phase. The songs are deeply intentional, the most meticulously crafted of their career. And yet, they still move with the same haunted, untethered freedom that’s always set the band apart: heavy but never leaden, beautiful but never soft.

Blackwater Holylight doesn’t offer easy catharsis. Their music asks for surrender and, in return, delivers something eerily close to transcendence.