Holy Pinto

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A couple of weeks ago, I was able to schedule a Zoom call with Aymen Saleh, better known as Holy Pinto. In this interview, I asked Aymen about what went into his forthcoming new album that features some collaborations with Bartees Strange, among others. We also chatted about the key inclusion of voice memos in this record that helped shape the narrative between songs, as well as much more. Today, Holy Pinto has released the piano version of “NOLY” here.

So thank you so much for your time today, Aymen. It’s great to connect with you again and see you face to face, albeit via Zoom, after only checking in through email periodically on various songs and stuff like that. So first of all, what was the writing process like for your upcoming album?

A lot went into it, actually! I think it was a very elongated writing period, especially the production and recording period. I was writing songs, and after our last release, I was really, really getting into the writing, and when it came to actually making the album and putting it together, I realized I had a lot more ambition, and I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to sonically do things, so I spent a lot of time on the recording and production. So, I would say the songs came relatively quickly in comparison, but then fleshing it out and getting together that product and making that vision on the album – that’s what took a long time. So it’s actually going to be my first album in a few years. So yeah, it kind of spans a bigger portion of my life than an album has in the past.

Yeah, and I think I saw on the advance that you gave me, in the description, that it took about four years, roughly, from start to finish. Is that correct?

I think so – it was a long time! I feel like I started writing the songs just before 2020 then I wrapped it in 2024. So, yeah, four years.

Oh, wow. It came together beautifully. I really enjoyed it! So I understand you worked at times with producer/musician Bartees Strange, who I’m also a big fan of. What was this collaboration like, and how did you guys meet in the first place?

We met through a mutual friend who works with Bartees, Henderson from “The Alternative”, who said that he was taking on more production and that he thought we’d be a good fit. And I was like, okay! I checked out his songs – it was really good. And I’m trying to collaborate more and more. And so, yeah, kind of bit the bullet and went out there, I believe he was in suburban DC at the time. He’s around your area, right? So I drove out there, and we did some stuff in his basement studio, and hung out for a few days. I took like three songs to him, and we chipped away at bits on each of them. Then I built the rest of the record when I got home and finished those songs – it was like three songs that got that flavor. He influenced me a lot in the way he creates, it’s really interesting. He’s a producer, producer. You can tell by the way his mind bounces around. He wants to pick up this or do that, he wants to add a new sound or element that you wouldn’t have considered. Really interesting. He was really influential on me with his work process. It was a very cool experience.

That’s awesome. Can you think of an example of when you guys were writing/collaborating, that something really stood out to you that influenced the sound on this record?

Yeah, something that really hit me was that he’s really into EDM. I didn’t know that about him. Around the time I started writing this record, I was doing some production work for other people where I was contributing instruments in like pop, hip-hop and other genres and Bartees also had that kind of grounding. There were points where he had out some of his sample pads. I’m not even good with the technical stuff, but there was like a sequencing drum pad. He was messing with that and building beats. And I was just like, “Wow, okay!” And then when it was introduced into everything, it just added a really cool layer and felt organic. Maybe it’s the product of the times we’re in now, in 2025, if you hear an electronic drum thing, you don’t think, “oh, this is pop” or “this is EDM”… I feel like when I was growing up, it’s like.. You couldn’t have put, like, a drum machine on a New Found Glory song, right? You just couldn’t do that. Everyone’s going to be like…what? But now it’s a layer that’s on a lot of stuff. I think going in on that was really interesting, it wasn’t an element I really considered. It helped me bridge him putting a lot of that stuff into his own music, and when we were working together, into mine. It made me realize that the production stuff and instruments I was doing for other people could also be applied. I’ve got a song coming on Tuesday called “noly” – that came out of a track I was asked to build around. It was an EDM Trance track, and they didn’t like what I did.. Not necessarily in a bad way, who knows! They might have loved it.. but it wasn’t used, right? So I was like, “Okay, there’s something in here”, so I kind of built around that. That was the biggest thing, I think that Bartees was seeing that you can dress up anything, in any clothes, and it’s still you, it’s still the song. You can pull at the enthusiasm, and there’s so much more energy than staying in the box – I think that was the biggest takeaway. So even though we only did like a week together, and he only had his hands on like three songs, it really shifted my mindset, I think he had a big influence on the album as a whole, in the intangible ways.

Definitely, that’s cool. And I think genre lines are blurring, much like you were saying before. It wouldn’t be kind of out of left field for a pop-punk band to put a drum machine in their songs these days. But back in the peak of the genre, in the early 2000s it would have been mind-blowing for people, and they wouldn’t be able to handle it…

Imagine if it was like, “Oh, here’s the new album from New Found Glory”, and then it started up with a drum machine…you’d be like, what happened?

<Laughter> Yeah, there’s no real transition there. So you mentioned your new single, called “noly,” which features some really cool, unique synth parts, great guitar playing, and some overall really cool vocal tones from you throughout the song. What was the inspiration behind that song?

That song came from that production project I did where I was contributing to an EDM, trance song. The influence in the heart of it was in this broody, loopy space. It was more minimalist. Unlike a lot of stuff I’ve done, there’s no dynamically changing, crazy guitars. It’s a lot of it’s built on loops, in the way an EDM song would be. And with that comes a lot of space. And I’m not a ‘space person’.. I think I have more of a “get bored.. want something fun here” brain. Want something fun here, brain. But when I write a song, with every gap I need something changing, like some drums going in there. And I think the first thing was if I use this soundscape that I created and I want to make the most of it… it feels like I’ve got to use the space or not do it at all. So, it started as this big space, and I kind of just really leant into that. I think for the first time for me it’s not a very verbose song – I didn’t write a ton of lyrics. It was very ‘let’s keep this minimal and ambiguous.. See if the mood and the music can do the talking and layer it like that. The line, which is “no one loves you, and no one ever will,” is very simple. It’s very ambiguous as well, which is important to me… it’s kind of a harsh line. It’s not nice, and I don’t want the listener to know whether I’m saying it about them, or they’re saying it about me. Even in that ambiguity, singing it repetitively, it felt not nice. So I texted some friends, and I was like, “Hey, can you leave me a voicemail, just telling me I’m a complete piece of shit, you hate me, and all this?” And so I got a couple of friends to do that, and I clipped it out, and then I put those voice notes, just to make me feel less mean. I was like, if I’m gonna say this mean line for three minutes, I’m gonna need some balance. So my friends told me I’m terrible. And it became a really fun mood, avant garde mood project. It’s a very, very unique one. I think it’s interesting. I’m really excited to see the response.

I think people are gonna respond to it pretty well, even with, like you mentioned, the voice memos kind of thing, kind of in the back of your headspace. So, let’s talk a little bit about those voice memos and speaking parts that appear sporadically throughout the listening experience of the new album. What did you pick out, and how did that process get put into the record?

Essentially, I think it was a similar kind of mindset where I had a lot of songs with a lot of words. A lot of it is essentially my feelings, my views.. or also not my views, just perspectives, but it still all feels very first person. It felt very “me.” because I played almost all the instruments on it, aside from some contributions, like Bartees. It just almost felt self-indulgent, and I had this thought, like…It’s not too uncommon, I think, in musicians and songwriters, but it was like, “I need another perspective.” Otherwise, I just feel a bit icky about it. If something feels like where I need other people’s perspective otherwise it’s the most self-indulgent, 18-track crazy thing. I started seeking that a bit in bar life. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where there’s a big bar culture, and a lot of my friends are bartenders, and we’d be chatting late night, and I’d be like, “Yo, can I just interview you?” Or even, in my kitchen. I channel my creativity and my expression into music, but I know a lot of people who are extremely great storytellers and in conversation it’s an incredible journey. I learned so much about a lot of my friends that I didn’t know, and got a lot of clips about like.. if I was writing a song about relationship or breakup, I would just ask my friend, “Hey, have you had something like this?” And they just talked for an hour, and then I condensed it down. And I just had a lot of clips of other people talking about the experiences that I’m writing about on the record, and it just felt really natural to kind of bring it together and not have one perspective. And it was amazing, I’m so glad I did that. I think I learned a lot about people, actually, friends’ stuff that I didn’t know, but also just the world and relationships, how people tick. It was really enriching, actually, and I’m really glad their voices get to be on the album as well.

Yeah, it kind of gives it almost like a community feel and kind of like that warmness of interactions that you have on a day to day basis. So I thought it was really cool how you interspersed them throughout…

Thank you!

Sure thing! Did you set any key goals for yourself during the writing and or recording process for this record?

Yeah, I think the overarching goal was to really lean into different sounds and arrangements, to really stray away from it being quite.. “normal band-y”. Everything on my last records, you could be in a room with the band, and it would all make sense. But for this, I wanted each song to live in a different room. Like you walk into one room and it might be like a pianist with two violins, or a cello, just doing a thing. And then you walk into another room and it’s like.. a pop-punk band or whatever. I really wanted it to just feel like every song served its own vision, and I’d never really done that before. I love lyrics, so it was very much like the classic thing of “Oh, I’m saying the words with an acoustic guitar, and this should be enough.” But then.. honestly, a lot of the world out there, especially us music fans, we are drawn to the way it’s dressed up, and it’s a whole new world of exploration. I think that’s something that I hadn’t really done before. So I think I really tried to lean into that, and then the more I did that, I realized that it was a sprawling project, a big album, lots of different bits, and then you kind of have to tie together the messiness. So I think it became like a project, an album, rather than a collection of songs. I recorded most of it myself. I had some help from people, but that really took a long time. Studio time with pros is expensive, and rightfully so, we all try to make a living, and they’re great at their job, but there is less time on the clock with a person who maybe doesn’t want to watch you twiddle with one organ sound for like, five days, you know? So it kind of became a necessity, but then also it kind of burned me. It was an interesting one. Went in really deep and wide. I learned a lot of the process.

That’s awesome. It’s great to hear your perspective on how you could kind of walk through the different rooms as you go from track to track. Were there any artists or records you kind of were drawn to during this period of time that you were influenced by?

Yeah, so many! I really like this guy Paul Cauthen’s record.. It’s like a country record, but it doesn’t really sound very country, called Room 41. I’m a big Alex Cameron fan, who’s very indie-synth pop. His songs are very strange, weird perspectives he leans into different visuals and a different mindset. He’s a crazy artist. Erlend Øye is one of my favorites. He’s actually a really good example of putting things in different rooms. He became famous with a band called Kings of Convenience. And I love their old records, which sound like Simon and Garfunkel, just two acoustic guitars. Are you familiar with any of this stuff?

Not yet, but I got some homework to do now! <Laughter>

Cool, yeah, so he was a singer in Kings of Convenience, and they’re like an acoustic guitar duo. You might know some of the songs from around that time – they used a lot of the music in commercials. And then he did a complete pivot and started the band called The Whitest Boy Alive, who were like EDM-funk. And then his new stuff.. he moved to Italy and bought a house for his mom, and then wrote an album in Italian with three of his mates playing various guitars. And he still does all three. Every time it’s his artistic voice, his songs, his words.. You know it’s him, but he’s putting them in these different rooms. And he’s one of my favorite artists to really do that. I think he does it with sound, which is really interesting. Alex Cameron does it with personality, or by deciding to be a different person on each record. And I think that that influences me a lot – people that can be themselves, but just kind of create a new version of themselves for brief amounts of time. And I think I went really hard on it. I think it’s the ‘getting bored thing’… I don’t think I could do a whole album of just one thing.. I think every song had to have its own one thing, I suppose I would say.

That’s cool. Was there any song on the new record that you feel fully realized your vision for this project?

Oh, that’s a really good question! Damn, that’s such a good question. I almost feel like there’s two kind of sides to the record. I feel like one is quite pop, EDM, like afrobeat-y, kind of indie-synth, and like all these kinds of extensions of ‘band music’ in the first half and the second half feels very ‘songwriter’, very piano lead, very strings, very kind of percussion, more that way. So I feel like “Us Forever” is a really good example of where the first half of the song, it’s got a lot of fake strings, synth, really loud, aggressive drums, choruses, some of the voiceovers, voicemails, some jazz trumpet. I think that has a lot of that eclectic band-y stuff. And then on the other side, I really like “Billboard.” I think it’s a piano ballad that really sums up the heart of a lot of what I was doing at that time that felt very ‘singer-songwriter’, honestly. I think very much like Ben Folds or Andrew McMahon, that kind of stuff that I grew up on and I loved.

That’s awesome. And those are two of the standouts that I keep coming back to on that record. So I can’t wait for others to hear it also, too. Do you have plans to tour on this material once that record finally comes out? And what do you envision will go into the production elements for the shows to support the record?

That’s a really good question. So I’m not sure when exactly when this <interview> will come out, but in March after “noly” comes out on March 4th, we’re doing a West Coast run for two and a half weeks. And to answer that part about the vision and the lineup.. I feel like we’ve got a week and a half to go and we’re really putting that together right now. It’s very interesting, we’re using a lot of the voice notes, a lot of the samples. I think we gave my drummer a pad that can do the voice notes. We’re not playing click tracks, any of that, but we are going to put in moments where we let whoever it was do their talking. And I think that’s going to be an interesting part of the live set that we’re going to incorporate, just to tie it all together. I think we’re quite a fun live band, so it will always be fun, engaging, way louder than people think, compared to the record, to be honest. Getting a lot of those voice notes in there, kind of letting some of the songs breathe. I think with the new album, we did have to rearrange certain things. There’s a song called “One Tattoo” on the record, which is quite almost Honky Tonk. It’s kinda like Beatles piano and then stomp claps. And live it’s almost, kind of slower, it has like a bass guitar and tom-tom thing being added in by my band that’s really cool, and kind of makes it feel more like maybe a Cake song or something. It’s got a different feel. We’ve rearranged certain things, I think, in an adding way, rather than a detracting way, which I find really cool. It’s always a thing, like, to interpret the record into a live <setting> and that’s something that I really believe in. We mostly rock a four piece, it’s mostly four of us these days, but right now, on this tour we’re doing <the shows> as a three piece, whilst I’ve got my bassist juggling keyboards as well. So we’re kind of trying to flesh out the sound a bit and keep it really dynamic and get some of that new album voice note stuff in there, for sure.

And do you put any work into like the visual aspect of your concerts or or is it you just want the music to be front and center, with no distractions around it? Or how are you gonna approach it?

You know what, I’ve never leaned into the visual side of concerts. I think that might be like the next frontier. I think when that feels right, it’ll really feel right. I think a lot of the shows we do right now, unless we’re opening for someone, tend to be smaller, kind of bar shows. So we’re like more amongst the people, and we’re chilling, and we’re having a beer with you, and we’re hanging out, then we’re playing some music and then back down at the bar.. that’s kind of like the vibe. I think for the bigger shows, we’re more in the dressing room backstage. I think the more we’re doing that, the more we might lean into, “Oh, this is a theater and there’s a stage. We’ve got to <put on a show>” And I think it’s interesting when artists do that. You see it on album cycles a lot. Andrew McMahon was a good one, I think he really did something on his last record, quite conceptual. One of my favorites, Jens Lekman, I think his girlfriend was a designer that essentially did jumpsuits for the whole band. Yeah, and he went on the record saying he didn’t think about that <before>, and that was the first time.. he was like, “Yeah, we should do something like that.” So that’s kind of the vibe I’m getting.. that’s a new frontier. I think that’d be really cool, especially on a really long tour, when you’re like, day in, day out for one month. And yeah, it appeals to me also, because if people are there, they’ll remember that moment..

Or when it kind of matches the aesthetic of the album cover kind of thing, or even if you did a live stream performance, where you could put tons of production elements into it for anybody to enjoy. I mean, some people love that platform for live streaming, but other people lean more into more of a music video kind of thing. So, any last words for your fans about ways they can stay connected with you leading up to the new record?

Yeah, for sure! I think Instagram is the social media platform that I’m probably on the most, that’s a good place to reach out. I’m trying to aggregate Substack right now, where I’m increasingly doing blogs and trying to get a mailing list going, because I want to make sure I can reach people that want to be reached and we can connect that way. So, Substack’s a really good one, yeah, those are probably the two main methods. We do tour a bunch, and we want to increase that. So staying in touch and keeping your eye out, especially the United States is mainly where we tour.. coming out when we’re in town, and seeing us live and kicking it with me. That’s probably the best place to stay in touch! And I hope that people find this to be an interesting album. I think it’s been a period of reevaluation for me where I’m doing a lot of different things, and I’m hoping that it clicks, and people are along for the ride. Especially when they get it to ‘start to finish’, rather than just an isolated single, and kind of see what I was going for. Because I think right now, I’m feeling like a lot of… we box genre too much, I think, and I think each song can live in its own space if it wants to. It’ll always sound like me and my lyrics, and that’s a given… but what about if it’s wearing a different costume? What about if it’s wearing a different get up, y’now? But I’m very excited about it, and thanks so much for having me for this interview, Adam!

This was fun! It was great to see you and connect with you again, Aymen. I can’t wait for others to hear the new album, too!

Thanks, Adam!

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