Nate Amos is ready for you to know This Is Lorelei

Where his previous releases had been written, recorded, and uploaded to Bandcamp without the need for a refined, strategic process, last year’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star charted a new course. It was Amos’ first album to get a traditional rollout, and it served as the most cohesive, intentional body of work from an artist hiding in plain sight. While the Bandcamp releases scratch an experimental itch, not tethered to any particular sound, length, or narrative, Box was deliberately melodic and personal, its rich emotional terrain emboldened by more direct influences of Americana, pop, and rock, and found fresh ears as a result.

“After that album did more than I ever expected it to, I got the distinct impression that a lot of the people who really liked it just didn’t realise that there was all this other stuff,” Amos explains. With more eyes on This Is Lorelei than ever, he decided to put together a new project, a companion piece to Box, titled Holo Boy. But Holo Boy isn’t a new album, so to speak. Rather, it’s a selection of songs from Amos’ sprawling catalogue; ten tracks picked from nine different releases and re-recorded earlier this year in his Bed-Stuy apartment.

Get the Best Fit take on the week in music direct to your inbox every Friday

Understanding where Holo Boy exists in his discography comes from understanding Amos’ trajectory as a musician, one that has long been oriented towards self-effacement and little wish for visibility. “At first I was very much focused on producing music for others and saw my own music as kind of a hobby,” he reflects. “At the end of the day, I’m just really shy. I’ve gotten over that in the context of performing, but not in the context of creating.”

When Amos first moved to New York from Chicago in 2016, the first This Is Lorelei live shows – which he notes were not a regular occurrence – had him actively trying to hide himself away. “I would just take the backline at any given venue and try to build a wall out of it, and I would sit behind it and perform so that no one could see me,” he says. “But at a certain point, I thought that was something I should get past.”

Amos did so by getting familiar with his audience in the most communal way he knew how at the time: karaoke. “I started doing these karaoke sets. On the day of the show, I’d post online asking what I should play. I’d play the recordings of the songs, stand on stage with the mic, and sing them while reading lyrics off the computer because I didn’t have the lyrics memorised. So, I flipped from totally hiding to just making it as embarrassing as possible. After that, I thought, I can sing if I’m holding a guitar. That’s easy, because it’s way less awkward than standing there and not knowing the words to your own songs.”

Considering the epic live run he’s had in 2025, it’s hard to envision him tucked away behind a barrage of stage equipment, but it’s clear his all-or-nothing approach has allowed him to make strides. In a creative sense, though, moving into the spotlight has been a more gradual process. “Even with music that I do make, I tend to make someone else the face of it,” he says of Water From Your Eyes, the experimental pop duo he formed back in Chicago with singer Rachel Brown. “That project was essentially designed so that I could just be like a freak behind the scenes, and that Rachel could be the face of it,” he says. “Having This Is Lorelei, where I’m actually the frontperson, I’ve had to work on getting over being self-conscious.”

Amos is now at a point where maintaining both This Is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes requires careful compartmentalisation. He notes that the projects have drifted apart, which makes the transitions between them more difficult. “Now they’re on totally different tracks, it takes a lot more effort to get from one place to the other,” he says. Whereas Water From Your Eyes “starts with chaos” that eventually resolves into a melody, with This Is Lorelei the melody most often comes first and the rest is figured out later.

Amos can’t force the decision of which project to write for, either. “I kind of just have to roll with whichever one of them is happening,” he says. “If I think too hard about one project, it can totally throw me off of writing for the other one. Whatever I’m trying to do, I’m going to fuck it up somehow, and it’s going to turn into something else.” For his own sake – and perhaps greater clarity – he emphasises the necessity of boundaries. “No matter how crazy a project is, you still need to define the sandbox. If you don’t set limits for yourself, then it just turns into nothing very quickly. It doesn’t take much for me to end up with just a 70-minute noise album that’s no use to anybody.”

Isolation is essential, too. For Amos, a ‘real’ recording studio tends to be an unproductive space when working on his own material, “not really firing past 30%” when someone else is in the room. “I think part of that is because I spent so much time producing music for other people, where the goal is to primarily listen and aid others in what they're trying to do,” he says. “So, when I end up in a collaborative situation, oftentimes that's what I kind of revert to. And the end result is usually exactly that, just producing the other person's thing.”

“I’m a control freak, for lack of a better term,” he adds. “In the time it would take to explain to someone what I'm going for, I could just get the thing done. And I lose focus on things so quickly. As soon as it becomes this long, drawn out, back and forth process, I'm just kind of over it and not that interested anymore. So it's also a speed thing, getting rid of the process of verbally communicating things and having it be a totally true interior experience without having to leave the concentrated space of creation.”

Holo Boy, then, could only have been made in the comfort of Amos’ own “space of creation,” the closet-sized room in Bed-Stuy where he could revisit his older songs in an intimate environment, free of observation. It replicates the more rigid conditions he stood by when he first started This Is Lorelei, when music for the project was made exclusively during winter visits to his family home in Vermont, away from his then-residence in Chicago. “That really was the first time I had ever really worked on music just by myself,” he says. Initially, the solitude was circumstantial, as there wasn’t anyone else around to collaborate with in the Vermont woods during the wintertime. But it did inform a crucial understanding of how he would go on to create.

“To me, this will always be a project that was born out of that, because that is how it started, in the woods in the winter,” he reflects. Even now, living in one of the most densely populated cities in America, the influence of Vermont remains. “I’m a pretty introverted person. I’ll find a way to isolate myself wherever I am. In Vermont, it’s easy, because there’s just woods outside. Whether I like it or not, that’s kind of how it continues to function in New York.”

The title, Holo Boy – which is also a track on the record – is a marker of the point by which This Is Lorelei started to become more than a project that could only grow in the Vermont winter. Taken from a 2015 EP titled Holo Lorelei, the song marked a shift in Amos’ process as the first Lorelei song to be made in Chicago rather than Vermont. “In some ways, it kind of feels like one of the first real Lorelei songs,” he says. “It was written and recorded really quickly with whatever was on hand: a mostly broken twelve-string guitar that was missing four random strings and an organ that was in the basement I was living in.”

Using what he has at his disposal, whether broken or imperfect, is still very much a part of Amos’ creative fabric. That same organ also appears on the new version of “Holo Boy”, having made the journey from Chicago to New York, giving the song a “weird glitchy sound.” The album also features a new bass he was excited about, despite it being “kind of busted and broken.” Letting his flawed equipment shape the sound of Holo Boy gives the album a unique signature, true to the unfussy approach that underlined his early work.

Having these threads connecting past and present helped Amos to navigate the unfamiliar territory of reworking old songs. Typically, he writes songs quickly, and how he goes about recording different material can vary drastically. With Holo Boy, he was working backwards. “It became more of a process of trying to find and highlight the commonalities shared between songs that were written in vastly different ways, during vastly different periods of time,” he notes, having realised that he needed to view things from a more curatorial perspective.

“There’s something about writing quickly that feels very improvisational to me, and I feel like that improvisational spirit is crucial to making a Lorelei thing feel like a Lorelei thing,” he explains. “When you’re working with pre-existing material, there isn’t really room for that. So the improvisational part of it was, just choosing ten songs off the dome without really thinking about it, and finding a way to make it work.”

Amos aimed to avoid referencing his back catalog too extensively, not wanting to get stuck in poring over his options, but also because he finds it too embarrassing to think back on things too much. In choosing the songs that came to mind as entry points to his work, without confining them to one specific era or story, he admits he could have “chosen songs five days in a row” and ended up with a wholly different list each time.

Of course, there have been moments where he’s second-guessed himself, wondering if he should have gone for different songs, but he interprets the uncertainty as one element of what Holo Boy is representing. “That’s part of the beauty of the intersection of improvisation and documentation,” he says. “You kind of force yourself to commit to something on the spot, for better or for worse.”

He'll freely admit that there are songs among the Lorelei back catalogue that would never get released if they had been written in 2025, but “the whole idea of the project was always that it’s kind of like unedited diary entries.” “It doesn’t matter if it’s kind of a shitty song, it’s still part of the process of making the other song, so it goes on anyway – unless I really hate it,” he says, laughing.

That Holo Boy was recorded quickly and instinctively during a brief window between tours brings a sense of urgency to the sound. Without wanting to overanalyse his process, Amos did have one guiding fixation during the recordings, looking to American prog-rock band Tool for inspiration in terms of how they crafted songs that offer multiple layers of enjoyment and experience. “I listened to almost nothing but Tool for like a whole year,” he says. “I fell into it, and I had this moment where I was like, this must be how people who get really into the Grateful Dead feel. All of a sudden that’s the only thing they’re interested in, which I’ve never understood. I was like, okay, maybe Tool is my Grateful Dead. Their music is infinitely detailed in a way that gives it severely high re-listen quality. It just became a comfort thing at a certain point.”

Does Amos seek that infinite detail in his own work? Not specifically, but perhaps he subconsciously recognises the potential for it in giving new life to his older songs. “I try not to think about things in such technical ways,” he clarifies. “The stuff that artists get fixated on, I think represents a very small fraction of what people actually connect to. When I look at the artists that I really love, the vast majority of the things that draw me to them are things that they’re just doing, and likely aren’t even part of the thought process. I try pretty hard to not overthink or do anything too intentionally, because then I get hung up on things that I’m pretty sure don’t even matter to other people.”

As Amos looks back he understands that, for most of its existence, This Is Lorelei was a quiet project used for developing skills that he assumed would be applied elsewhere. “It was more about honing my writing skills than it was about writing anything in particular, kind of just practice and experimenting, largely for the sake of other projects,” he explains. The idea that it would become a primary focus, leading him directly to major opportunities, seemed incomprehensible.

“Even while I was making Box for Buddy, if I had travelled in time and told myself, ‘Hey, you’re going to be playing these songs at Primavera’ or whatnot, I would have been like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever dude.’ It was just never intended to be that,” he says. “If I had seen Lorelei as a project that I was really trying to do anything in particular with, I don’t think it would have ever evolved in that way. It’s kind of like a symptom of the mistakes made over the course of a decade.”

“It wasn’t until I was around 30 or so that it began to feel like my own music might be a reasonable thing to pursue in a more serious way,” he admits. “And now, This Is Lorelei has gone from the kind of thing that I have to fit into my life in some way, to the kind of thing where I actually have a career doing it. I’m allowed to fully focus on it now, which is all I’ve ever really wanted.” What’s changed the most for Amos, then, isn’t the music itself but his relationship with it. “I have a lot more confidence in what I’m doing now than I ever did before. I feel like I’ve figured out what I’m trying to do. And I’ve definitely stopped waiting for or looking for external validation.”

When uncertainty did creep in when wrapping up the Holo Boy recordings, knowing how to validate his work meant that he could remedy his questioning. “I gave it a day, came back to it, listened to it again and thought, ‘I don’t know about this’. Then I put it down for a week and when I came back to it, I was like, ‘You know what? This is fine. This is exactly what I set out to make.’”

A decade into his solo work, the walls that Amos used to hide behind are crumbling and Lorelei is stepping out into the light, still in his near-impulsive flow but with a newfound focus. “All the old songs and the more recent albums, I’m very happy with,” he says, summing up. “But I feel like those things are now enabling me to hopefully make the stuff that I was always supposed to make. There’s a sense of feeling like, okay, now I’m ready to actually do the thing.”