8/10

'wedding season' is the kind of album that could only exist after years of living with it. For Holy Pinto, the indie-pop project of British songwriter Aymen Saleh, this is a sprawling, meticulously assembled record shaped by love, memory, partnership, distance and the strange way relationships change once experience begins colouring the optimism of their earliest moments.

That idea comes into particularly sharp focus on its lead single ‘us, against the world’. Built around piano and gradually opening into something more theatrical, the track looks back at the beginning of a relationship, when everything still feels effortless, exciting and full of possibility. There's a tenderness to that nostalgia, but also a quiet ache in recognising that no partnership remains untouched by time.

Across its eighteen-song tracklist, he moves between intimate songwriting and more ambitious arrangements, allowing humour, melancholy and observation to coexist without forcing the record into one fixed mood. The influence of Death Cab for Cutie and Ben Folds can be felt in the balance between melody and detail, while its softer moments carry a dreamier piano-led quality inspired in part by Elliott Smith.

But the album’s real character comes from the sheer amount of attention poured into it. Parts were recorded in Bartees Strange’s basement in Washington, D.C., while other sessions took place in the artist’s Milwaukee apartment, a rural Wisconsin boat warehouse, a southern Illinois cathedral and an industrial piano repair shop. Those environments feed into a record that feels deliberately textured and slightly unpredictable.

Warm, bruised, funny and richly detailed, 'wedding season' captures Holy Pinto at his most expansive. It's the sound of a songwriter refusing to simplify the mess, and making something far more rewarding because of it.