How Strange It Is Compress Their Loudest Moment on “Holladay Park”

How Strange It Is have been revealing their second album one contrast at a time. The Portland band shared “Slime” first — a burst of shoegazey pop-rock chaos — then followed with “Tough Luck,” a whispery, Sparklehorse-indebted track that felt like a deliberate pull inward. Now “Holladay Park” arrives as a third point on that spectrum.

The song runs under two minutes, but it does not feel truncated. It moves with a sly patience before the chorus opens up and the guitars crash in with enough force to reset the room. The catharsis is compressed, not rushed, which makes the brevity part of the design rather than a limitation.

As a preview of There Is No Evil, the single reinforces that the album is working through tension between noise and restraint. Each track has given a different answer to the same question, and “Holladay Park” lands somewhere between the extremes — loud and clear for a moment, then gone.