‘Night Terrors’

Published 6:50 am Friday, June 16, 2017

Holiday Friends, an Astoria-based alternative rock band, christened their upcoming album “Night Terrors” for a special reason:

When Scott Fagerland, the lead singer-songwriter, began writing the eponymous track, he was having actual night terrors about the band’s future, facing down his 30s, reckoning with life’s disappointments.

The 11-track album comes during a time of self-reflection for Holiday Friends, which has taken various forms since its founding in 2008.

“We do it because we like it, and it’s fun,” Fagerland said. “But it comes with its fair share of frustrations,” such as “trying to balance it with your daily life when it’s not paying the bills.”

The indie group, though indisputably popular on the North Coast, hasn’t yet caught fire as they once hoped to do.

In addition, the four band members — now in their late 20s and 30s — are old enough to write songs about experiencing “certain things that didn’t go exactly how you wanted them to,” he said.

These feelings underscore the new album, where listeners will encounter a darker, edgier, more willingly vulnerable Holiday Friends than the ensemble that delivered the lighthearted “Chicks” in 2012 and “Major Magic” in 2014.

“This is, hands down, the most personal album we’ve made,” bassist Zack O’Connor said.

Three singles — “Heartbreak Kid,” “Rocket Summer” and “Yellow Light” — are now available, each with its own music video. On June 23 — the day the full album debuts — the band will play a record release show at Portland’s Mississippi Studios, followed by a run of Pacific Northwest shows.

The band has had multiple rebirths. They are now in what they believe is the final iteration, which consists of three core members — Fagerland, the frontman; his older brother, Jon Fagerland, a multi-instrumentalist; and O’Connor — and Joey Ficken, the drummer and newest member who joined in 2015.

Besides venturing into a new realm of self-disclosure, “Night Terrors” represents another personal victory: They recorded and produced it themselves, marking the first time Holiday Friends has created an album independently.

For years, the band focused on writing upbeat music that people could dance to. “Chicks” in particular was “silly, playful,” O’Connor said. “Practically every song was an inside joke.”

But this time they wanted to compose closer to the heart.

A handful of Scott Fagerland’s lyrics emerged from “the compounded feelings of not being able to get to where I wanted to go with the band,” he said. Some were born of the dread that striving artists know well: that perhaps, after years of effort, they may never earn enough money or exposure to make their art a full-time gig.

“We’ve been trying for years to have this be what we do,” O’Connor said, “and getting some traction here, some traction there, but never having it just take.”

The band worked to justify every note and phrase, to make each song resonate. “Every component needed to kind of earn its keep,” O’Connor said.

“We’re all pretty happy with it,” Scott Fagerland said.

“Part of me wants this record to be a foundation for what’s to come,” he added. “And maybe, from this point on, people will start to be like, ‘Oh, that’s Holiday Friends’ sound.’”

Early on, the band considered moving from small, rural Astoria to Portland or Los Angeles, Scott Fagerland said, “because we’re kind of more of a pop rock band, and we should be getting our disco pants on, our shiny coats, and going to Hollywood, trying to hit the big time.

“But the longer we stay here, we’re just like, ‘Man, I don’t want to live anywhere else,’” he said, with a laugh.

O’Connor said, “This town has some sort of magnetism, I don’t know what it is, but I experience it all the time.’”

The latest songs contain more Pacific Northwest imagery than does their previous work; there’s a stronger sense of place.

“For a long time, I just didn’t feel like where we lived mattered. But I think it does now,” said Scott Fagerland, who in “Yellow Light” sings: “You’re the yellow light of a North Coast town / You’re dancing on the water …”

Rather than move to a big city to engage in a Darwinian struggle with other bands, Ficken said, “we’re focusing more on quality of life — and the ability to take advantage of the current age of music, which means that you can live anywhere and still reach a lot of people if need be.”

And for their cover art, they turned to Darren Orange — a prominent and distinctive local painter with an instantly recognizable style — who gave them permission to use his work.

Though the band has yet to achieve full liftoff, Scott Fagerland has wondered lately if that kind of success — on the order of The National and Local Natives — is something he still wants to attain.

He began to relinquish that sense of unfulfillment a few years back, he said, when Holiday Friends was pushing extra hard to get discovered and fall into a full-time touring circuit.

Now they doubt whether that should be their focus. For, in the end, “we just want to make music, and we want to make music that we care about.”

“And not go broke doing it,” Jon Fagerland added.

To be sure, that old feeling — of wanting to explode onto the popular music scene — is still there. “You’re just like, ‘Wow, we have been doing this for a long time.’” Scott Fagerland said. “It can feel like you’re just pushing a rock up the hill.”

But allowing these thoughts to inform “Night Terrors” was, for him, a cathartic experience, one he hopes listeners can relate to.

“It’s not meant to be a sad record. Overall, it’s positive,” he said. “But there’s just those moments, where you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’ve felt that way before, and it feels good to hear it.’”