Karleshia Reveals Haunting, Atmospheric Single ‘Holy Low’
After a difficult seven years away from music, Ōtautahi-based artist Karleshia breaks their silence with Holy Low, the first single from their forthcoming debut EP Church Trauma, set for release Friday 30 October.
Crossing genre divides between indie, alt-folk and dark-ambient song-writing, Karleshia creates immersive emotionally driven music that blends intimate lyricism, cinematic atmosphere, and a raw, potent vocal presence.
An emotionally unflinching track, Holy Low introduces an artist who is making a return to music following a life-altering and devastating break with the church. The former worship leader has emerged years later, having processed and turned their trauma into a powerful body of songs exploring faith, identity, sexuality and the difficult work of finding your way back to yourself.
Holy Low is a beautifully visceral track, showcasing Karleshia’s soaring and otherworldly vocal. The lyrical content speaks to a complicated and highly personal reckoning of their faith, and the chasm between what they was taught to believe in, and the treatment they eventually experienced within that community.
Holy Low is the first glimpse into a body of work that emerged from that cognitive dissonance of their faith, and is the first track off their upcoming debut EP Church Trauma, four brutally honest tracks that strip back the searingly painful realities of losing the faith you have built your life and identity around.
With their identity in music firmly aligned with their involvement in church, Holy Low serves as a searing critique of the structural patriarchal bias, hierarchies and contradictions they experienced from church leaders after spending over a decade devoted to and immersed in, their church community.
The single reveals the painful realities of religious exploitation, written from Karleshia’s first-hand experience of feeling used by a church movement at too young an age to realise it.
Says Karleshia: “Holy Low is about the perils of being invested in a church movement so young that I did not realise I was being used. Lines like “Here’s your pedestal, in my image” are a blatant reflection on all the hard work I felt I had put in, only for some married man to be seen as better than me and that all my work, faith, and effort was in vain”.
Holy Low is not simply a song about leaving a church. It is the sound of someone taking back their voice back after being told they no longer had a place to use it. And after seven years of silence, Karleshia now has plenty to say.
Holy Low is now available on all major streaming platforms.
Karleshia – debut EP Church Trauma
Stories about leaving, healing and coming home to yourself.
Due out Friday 30 October
