Artist: Holding Absence
Album: Modern Life Is Lonely
Genre: Post-Hardcore / Alternative Rock / Emo
Release: 28 August 2026
Label: Sumerian Records
Tracks: 11
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸 5/5 Guitars
Modern life is weird, isn’t it?
We’re supposedly more connected than at any point in human history. Phones buzzing every thirty seconds. Group chats. Social media. Video calls. Thousands of people permanently available at the tap of a screen.
Yet somehow loneliness still creeps through the cracks.
That’s the uncomfortable contradiction sitting at the heart of Holding Absence’s fourth album, Modern Life Is Lonely.
And bloody hell, have they turned it into something special.
The Cardiff outfit have always understood how to transform huge emotions into huge music. Love, loss, grief, mortality and hope have run through their catalogue from the beginning, carried by Lucas Woodland’s extraordinary voice and the band’s increasingly cinematic approach to post-hardcore.
But Modern Life Is Lonely feels like another leap.
It’s heavier when it needs to be.
Quieter when it matters.
More atmospheric.
More ambitious.
And occasionally absolutely devastating.
This isn’t simply another Holding Absence record.
It feels like the moment they step into another league.
And yes, we’re going to say it…
Wales has produced another bloody belter. 🐉🤘
💿
Track Listing
- Reanimate
- Reflection
- Heaven
- Modern Life Is Lonely
- Take Me With You
- shells_like_us.int
- Whisper Of A Dream
- Lucid Love
- Scorched Earth
- lullaby.int
- Kyoto Snow
🖤
Track-by-Track Review
1. Reanimate
There’s something wonderfully appropriate about beginning an album dealing with modern isolation with a song called Reanimate.
It feels like waking up.
Slowly.
Atmosphere builds before Holding Absence begin revealing the enormous emotional scale of what’s coming.
Then Lucas Woodland arrives.
That voice.
Instantly recognisable.
Fragile one moment.
Absolutely colossal the next.
Welcome back.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
2. Reflection
One of the album’s immediate highlights.
Reflection feels like standing in front of a mirror and confronting everything you’ve spent years trying not to look at.
There’s self-doubt.
Frustration.
Recognition.
But also the possibility of change.
Musically, the song gradually expands until Woodland is soaring above everything.
Huge.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
3. Heaven
Holding Absence have always been particularly good at making beautiful music feel slightly painful.
Heaven continues that tradition.
There’s warmth within the melody, but sadness remains permanently underneath it.
The band resist turning everything into some enormous rock cliché, instead allowing the emotional tension to carry the track.
Beautiful stuff.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
4. Modern Life Is Lonely
The title track gets straight to the heart of the record.
We’ve never been more connected.
We’ve rarely felt more isolated.
That contradiction is everywhere.
The song gradually becomes enormous around Woodland’s vocal, but the real heaviness isn’t coming from distortion.
It’s coming from recognition.
Anyone who’s ever stared at a phone containing hundreds of contacts and still felt completely alone will understand this one.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
5. Take Me With You
After confronting loneliness comes the desperate desire for connection.
Take Me With You feels almost like reaching out before somebody disappears.
There’s urgency underneath the entire song.
Not panic exactly.
Something more vulnerable.
Don’t leave me here.
Simple sentiment.
Massive emotional impact.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
6. shells_like_us.int
A moment to breathe.
Kind of.
This short interlude feels like wandering through fragments of memory.
Digital noise.
Emotional debris.
Pieces of something that used to feel whole.
It divides the record beautifully without interrupting its flow.
🎸🎸🎸🎸
7. Whisper Of A Dream
Absolutely gorgeous.
Whisper Of A Dream is Holding Absence operating at widescreen scale.
The atmosphere gradually grows before everything opens into an enormous emotional landscape.
This is the sort of song you can already picture echoing across festival fields.
Darkness.
Thousands of voices.
Phones in the air.
Goosebumps everywhere.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
8. Lucid Love
There’s something beautifully bittersweet about Lucid Love.
Holding Absence explore connection again, but nothing ever feels guaranteed.
Love can save you.
Love can hurt you.
Love can disappear.
The band capture that uncertainty without becoming melodramatic, wrapping everything inside one of the album’s most immediately accessible songs.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
9. Scorched Earth
🔥 Here we go.
The temperature rises considerably.
Scorched Earth carries genuine anger and destruction, with the instrumentation becoming more aggressive while Woodland pushes his voice harder.
Yet it never becomes heavy simply for the sake of heaviness.
Everything serves the emotion.
When the riffs hit, they hit because they’ve earned it.
Absolute monster.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
10. lullaby.int
Another brief moment of calm.
After Scorched Earth, it feels almost unsettling.
The fighting stops.
The noise disappears.
Everything floats.
And you know perfectly well the final emotional battering is waiting around the corner.
Cheers, lads.
🎸🎸🎸🎸
11. Kyoto Snow
❄️ Here it is.
The destination.
Kyoto Snow closes Modern Life Is Lonely with more than five minutes of cinematic emotion.
Holding Absence don’t rush.
They let the song breathe.
Everything we’ve travelled through—loneliness, connection, mortality, memory, love and hope—seems to hang over these final moments.
And rather than finishing with some unnecessarily gigantic Hollywood explosion, the record reaches its destination naturally.
Then silence.
You sit there.
Possibly emotionally ruined.
And probably press play again.
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
🔥
The Breakdown
🎤
Vocals — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
Lucas Woodland is phenomenal.
Yes, there’s range.
Yes, there’s power.
But neither matters as much as one simple thing:
You believe every word.
🎸
Guitars — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
Scott Carey understands restraint.
Atmospheric textures make the heavier moments considerably more powerful when the riffs finally arrive.
🎸
Bass — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
Benjamin Elliott provides enormous depth throughout, anchoring the record without overwhelming its more delicate moments.
🌌
Atmosphere — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
Exceptional.
These eleven tracks feel connected by a single emotional landscape.
✍️
Songwriting — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
Holding Absence have become masters at balancing huge melodies with intensely personal emotions.
🏆
Standout Tracks
🪞 Reflection
🖤 Modern Life Is Lonely
🌌 Whisper Of A Dream
🔥 Scorched Earth
❄️ Kyoto Snow
🐉
Welsh and Bloody Proud
Forgive us a moment of shameless Welsh pride.
Because this matters.
Holding Absence emerged from Cardiff and have steadily transformed themselves into one of the most exciting alternative rock bands Britain has produced in years.
Not through gimmicks.
Not through chasing whatever happens to be trending.
Through songs.
Bloody brilliant songs.
Watching a Welsh band take increasingly ambitious music onto international stages is exactly the sort of thing The Riff Report exists to celebrate.
And Modern Life Is Lonely feels like another massive step.
This doesn’t sound like a band wondering whether they belong alongside the biggest names in modern alternative music.
It sounds like a band who already know they do.
Cymru am byth. Cymru am riffs. 🐉🤘
🤘
The Riff Report Verdict
There’s an irony buried inside Modern Life Is Lonely.
An album about isolation will inevitably bring people together.
These songs will be screamed by thousands of strangers standing shoulder-to-shoulder in venues.
People who have never met.
People carrying completely different stories.
All briefly connected by the same words.
That’s powerful.
Holding Absence understand that emotional music doesn’t need to provide easy answers.
Sometimes acknowledging the question is enough.
Modern Life Is Lonely doesn’t promise everything will be fine.
Instead, it says:
We understand.
And musically, the band have created something worthy of that message.
Post-hardcore remains part of their DNA, but Holding Absence have expanded considerably beyond genre boundaries.
There are cinematic textures.
Electronic details.
Alternative-rock hooks.
Crushing heaviness.
Near silence.
And one of Britain’s finest rock vocalists standing at the centre of everything.
Four albums in, Holding Absence aren’t merely fulfilling their potential anymore.
They’re defining what comes next.
THE RIFF REPORT RATING
🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸
5/5 GUITARS
Emotional. Cinematic. Devastating. Beautiful.
Holding Absence have taken the loneliness of modern existence and transformed it into something capable of connecting thousands of people.
One of Wales’ finest bands just got even better. 🐉🖤🔥🤘
:::
Michael is the founder, editor, and chief riff wrangler behind The Riff Report, an independent Welsh rock and metal publication built by fans, for fans. With a lifelong passion for loud guitars, unforgettable live shows, and the incredible community that surrounds rock and metal, he created The Riff Report to celebrate everything that makes the scene special—from legendary headline acts and grassroots venues to rising bands that deserve to be heard.
A familiar face at festivals across the UK, Michael spends much of the year covering events including Download Festival, Bloodstock Open Air, Steelhouse Festival, Firevolt, Plumpton Revival, and many more. Whether he’s battling the Welsh weather on a mountainside, surviving a weekend in a muddy campsite, or squeezed against the front barrier with thousands of fellow fans, he’s always searching for the next great story to share.
As editor of The Riff Report, Michael writes festival guides, breaking news, album reviews, gig reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, nostalgia features, and behind-the-scenes stories from across the rock and metal world. His writing combines honest opinions, humour, and a genuine love for live music, bringing readers closer to the bands, festivals, venues, and people that keep the scene alive.
Michael is particularly passionate about supporting independent artists, local venues, charities, and the wider UK rock and metal community. He believes every band deserves a chance to be discovered and every festival has a story worth telling. Through The Riff Report, he aims to shine a spotlight on both the biggest names in rock and the future stars waiting to break through.
When he’s not writing or interviewing artists, you’ll probably find him exploring festival campsites, photographing live shows, chatting with fellow fans over a pint, or planning the next road trip in search of more riffs, bigger crowds, and unforgettable moments.
Above all, Michael believes rock and metal are about more than music—they’re about community, friendship, and creating memories that last a lifetime. That’s exactly what The Riff Report exists to celebrate.
Proudly Welsh. Proudly Loud. Always chasing the next great riff. 🤘
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