Holy Pinto is the indie-pop project of British songwriter Aymen Saleh. Originally formed in Canterbury, England, and now based in Milwaukee, the project celebrates the release of its long-awaited third album, Wedding Season, with a special hometown release show featuring the full band and a handful of wonderful local artists.
Holy Pinto’s Aymen Saleh has never been one to rush an idea, but Wedding Season took its time even by his standards. Started in 2021 and labored over for years, the album is the most complete realization yet of Saleh’s particular songwriting instincts: funny and bruised, restless and intimate, full of wry detail, sharp left-turns and chummy wisdom. If earlier Holy Pinto releases introduced Saleh as a gifted indie songwriter with one foot in emo and another in classic indie-pop, Wedding Season is the fullest expression yet of his instincts as a songwriter, arranger and thinker.
Saleh grew up in Canterbury, England, started Holy Pinto there and eventually carried the project across the Atlantic, landing in Milwaukee and finding a city that made unexpected sense to him. He connected with its music scene, its bar culture and its blue-collar warmth. It’s the kind of city where it’s easy to meet people and easy to end up talking for hours. Wedding Season sounds like the product of exactly that kind of life: a record made by someone who listens closely, stores away stray remarks, and continually finds his own story refracted in other people’s.
That sense of connection is the heart of the album. Wedding Season is full of Saleh’s songs about love, distance, doubt and adulthood, but it is also threaded through with voices from outside his own head, including field recordings of late-night conversations with friends and kindred souls at neighboring bar stools. Saleh remains the central narrator, but he uses the people around him to complicate and echo his own experience.
Wedding Season is a meticulously assembled record. Saleh spent years tinkering with arrangements, reworking songs and chasing sounds that could not have been captured by simply plugging in a band and playing them straight. Some of the album began in the Washington, D.C. basement of Bartees Strange. Much of it was written and recorded in Saleh’s apartment above a Brady Street bar in Milwaukee, interspersed with DIY sessions in spaces including a rural Wisconsin boat warehouse, a southern Illinois cathedral and an industrial piano repair shop. Along the way, he became less interested in documenting songs in their simplest form than in building a record that could hold all the strange little details he wanted it to hold: room tone, overheard stories, bits of atmosphere, moments of humor, moments of panic and the ornamental flourishes that make a song feel inhabited.
You don’t have to strain to hear the touchpoints. There is some of Death Cab for Cutie’s clarity and emotional plainspokenness in Saleh’s songwriting, some of Ben Folds’ melodic bounce and piano-minded craft and a lot of Jens Lekman’s gift for turning awkward, funny, highly specific observations into something bigger and sadder than they first appear. But Wedding Season does not play like a neatly assembled set of influences. It sounds like one songwriter following his own thoughts farther than usual and refusing to stop when the songs get messier, stranger, or more revealing than expected.
After years of starting over, second-guessing himself and sitting with the material long past the point when most musicians would have rushed it out, Saleh landed at a document of one songwriter trying to make sense of his life by pulling other voices into the frame. It is patient, searching and obsessively assembled. It’s the work of an artist who kept obsessing at an idea until he finally cracked it.
