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Drummer James Mulholland has a tendency to turn his head to the side whenever he’s on stage, which often means he doesn’t get a chance to see the audience he’s performing for. Yet on the night of July 20, while playing with his indie punk band Holiday Death Tribute, Mulholland decided to look up at the DC9 crowd. The band were three songs into their set and already people were dancing and moshing. The scene was exhilarating. “I had been envisioning something like this for a long time, but it never happened until that show,” Mulholland tells City Paper. “I finally understand what it means to have your jaw drop.”
The band found this show particularly spectacular not only because they managed to get the crowd to dance but also because they were dancing to songs that haven’t been released. At the time Holiday Death Tribute had nothing out at all. “DC9 was a turning point,” says bassist Chris Fuller. “We had friends dance to us at shows before but to see a mosh pit for songs that nobody had heard before was a really weird feeling—in a good way.”
Following that performance, Mike Dzambasow, the guitarist and founder of Holiday Death Tribute, found himself wanting to push the band even farther. He’s been aiming for bigger mosh pits, larger crowds, and new venues. “When I perform I get really locked in with what I’m doing,” Dzambasow says. “If I can get the crowd going then all I can think about is maintaining that.”
“Basically, he gives it all he’s got,” adds Amanda Lin, the band’s lyricist, manager, and Dzambasow’s fiancee.
But soon audiences won’t be moshing to unreleased songs when they go to the band’s performances. Holiday Death Tribute plan to drop their debut single, “Practice,” on Nov. 3 and accompany it with a release show at Slash Run that same night.
Though Holiday Death Tribute are a project that Dzambasow and Lin have been trying to start since 2021, the current lineup has only existed for about a year. Their intention is to create punk music that makes audiences dance. Mulholland describes their sound as evoking “sneakers, jeans, a dirty shirt, and maybe a flannel if it’s cold.”
“I would say take a lot of the angst of millennials and Gen Z, put it in a basement, give three people instruments, and let them play whatever comes to mind,” says Mulholland. “That’s the energy that comes out of this band.”
Inspired greatly by Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and Jeff Buckley, Dzambasow and Lin like to write music with a rebellious nature. “We’re trying to write songs that process some intense things that happened in our lives and turn them into a sort of healing process,” Dzambasow says.
The way Holiday Death Tribute use music to heal from trauma can best be seen in their upcoming single. “Practice” tells the story of Dzambasow and Lin’s first attempt at starting a band while living in Portland in 2021. The original act broke up when their former bandmates pushed Dzambasow away. In fact, one of those former members told Dzambasow to practice the piano even though he’s a piano teacher. That’s how the title of the song came to be. “I had to get this frustrating experience off my chest,” Dzambasow says. “The song is meant to tell musicians that even though practice is important, it can be taken too far.”
“Practice” is just the start of what the band hopes will be a series of releases that will culminate in an album Dzambasow and Lin have been working on for five years. They wrote their first song together in 2018. Since then they’ve been dedicated to booking performances and getting their music out to audiences. Managing the band is a lot of work but Lin believes it’s all been worth it. “Music was always Mike’s dream,” Lin says. “And then it became my dream … We were always going to do this.”
Despite all the troubles Dzambasow and Lin had when forming the band initially, they’re glad to now have friends like Mulholland and Fuller helping them realize their dream. “It’s just the beginning,” Dzambasow says. “We were figuring things out and now we’re taking what we learned to another level. It’s only going to get better.”
Holiday Death Tribute play with Sleepmarks and Old Knife at 9 p.m. on Nov. 3 at Slash Run. slashrun.com. $10–$15.
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