“What it means to be [an] amorphous teenager and not know what you’re becoming, and that kind of moment of potential magic that I think everybody has.” So says Emil Amos, the prolific artist behind Holy Sons, opening the first episode of his podcast, “Drifter’s Sympathy.”
“I wanted to delve into [the] atmosphere and romance of those times, if that’s nostalgic or not I don’t care. I just like to go through the past. I do it every day, it’s kind of a thing I’ve always done.” Fitting words from a musician whose discography is expanding with new music, and–through his Lost Decade series–compilations of home recordings made throughout the ’90s, before adopting the Holy Sons moniker, before forming Grails and Lilacs & Champagne, before joining Om.
Lost Decade—the first in the series—was released in 2000, marking the inaugural output under the Holy Sons banner, and now, in 2025, Amos has released Lost Decade IV. A pervasive sense of that nostalgia he spoke of—of looking back on the past as if it’s a physical item one can hold in hand, turn over, inspect for flaws and beauties—abounds on the new release. The wonders of its construction coming through the music itself.
Recorded in the laundry rooms, attics, and basements of the ’90s, Lost Decade IV sounds like alternate reality radio broadcasts. Conjuring images of dusty roads, lost highway motels, and a life lived out of a bag—allowing drifters to move from town to town, sleeping on couches or in your car. It’s a snapshot of time when you scrape by life working odd jobs, focusing on making art.
The songs of Lost Decade IV fade in and out of clarity, presenting an Americana melded with ’90s lo-fi touchstones, the rock and roll greats, patron saints of the lonely. The album opens with an electrified version of “If It’s Lawless.” The original, released on 2014’s Lost Decade II, has a druggy haze, on which Amos’ vocals tumble out impossibly slow, on the verge of breaking. While the electric version swaggers with the bravado of ’90s slacker rock, almost hitting sing-a-long levels before track two, “James Dean,” bleeds into the picture.
“Knowing You” features a woozy, stoned instrumental intro. When Amos’ vocals do come in, they are deeper, more deadpan than elsewhere on the album, calling to mind Calvin Johnson’s iconic vocals in lo-fi band Beat Happening. Later in the album, “C’mon Christ” opens with distorted samples before what sounds like a channeling of Lou Reed—a snotty Reed, sneering, all smiles. “First It Was The Others” is the perfect hot summer soundtrack: Sitting on a front porch, barefoot with a friend or two, a joint, a pack of cigarettes, and a half-rack of Hamm’s.
Mid-album highlight “Aloneness” starts hypnotic, the vocals devolving into a mumble before snapping again to clarity, coming back with a slight quaver to them—as if a new wave of an ongoing LSD trip has hit. Reality shifting slightly, the light seeming a little different than it did just seconds ago. Maybe a little brighter? Maybe a little more solid? The song ends with repeated mantra, “Understand you’re not wounded under there,” the vocals multitracked, piling up one on top of the other.
A press release for Lost Decade IV describes each installment of the series as, “snapshots of someone undergoing a unique mania.” In an LA Weekly interview from 2011, Amos speaks about his drug use, saying, “When you’re 16 and start using drugs every single day and don’t let up for years, [you begin struggling] with severe depersonalization, where nothing seems real. You basically melt down the DNA of your personality and become a puddle of broken-down potentialities. The day you disassemble your psyche on LSD is the first day of the rest of your life. To this day I’m still trying to piece together my mind.”
One might wonder if the title Lost Decade refers to a decade lost to drug use, or a decade of art-making without the end result being an audience. One might expect this album—or any of Amos’ albums—to be a psychic ramshackle mess, which it is, and presented as stylistic experiment.
As is true throughout his catalog, variations on a theme, such as sudden endings, oblique samples, and psychedelic perception, are all present on Lost Decade IV. It’s the coherency of a drifter that, even though they drift—from town to town, thought to thought, genre to genre—art acts as a guiding light.
Jonathan Ludwig
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