towhead is the Oakland-based project of Walker Price, who recently shared the debut EP from the project titled Hollow Earth. The three-piece, made up of Price, as well as lj Canonizado and Finn Palamaro, wring out the grit collected within their elongated soundscapes, prioritizing their intuition to form these edged grooves and hazed environments that carry through with reserved intensity. Although only four tracks long, Hollow Earth grips your focus for almost half an hour, playing out a dramatization of the mundane, the shifting dynamics that choreograph our lives, almost always unbeknownst to us in the moment. 

We recently got to ask towhead a few questions regarding their debut EP as well as what they have planned for what’s next.  

How did this project come to be? What is your relationship as a creative unit and how do you utilize that in the music you make? 

towhead started as a bedroom pop / folk project a few years ago — i started playing shows under the moniker in 2021, but we didn’t start playing as a band until about a year and a half later. lj and i met in college, and finn and i met through music (i also play in their band called new not shameful). our relationship as a creative unit is definitely an extrapolation of a solo project, with me writing the songs and then spending some time with them before sending them to the band. we’ll experiment with arrangements for a little while before making any decisions. i feel super lucky to be able to make music with the two of them, there’s little that needs to be talked about when we’re working on songs, we end up on the same page nine times out of ten.

Originally beginning as a bedroom pop / folk project, what brought you to make a meandering and dynamic collection of songs like Hollow Earth? Was this an avenue that you always wanted to explore? In what aspects did you challenge your comfort zone while exploring this sound? 

i think more than anything it was time. i used to have a really feverish approach to making a song; i would write a song, let it fester for maybe a week or so, and then record it to tape or on my laptop. with these songs i forced myself to be more intentional with my writing, and set out with some semblance of an idea in my head when i’d write. that idea would often end up blurred and only tangentially related to the finished work. i’ve also found myself listening to a lot more ambient and experimental music in the past 5 years, and thus gravitating towards writing songs that don’t necessarily depend on traditional structures. i think i’d kind of been using that as a crutch, and once i let go of it i felt a lot happier with and connected to what i was writing.

From what it seems, towhead has been playing shows frequently since you began back in 2023. How much are these songs influenced by your live performances? Did any of the songs go through changes the more you would play live?

oh absolutely. all of the songs on hollow earth have existed for a long time, and as we play together it helps us get a feel for what works best in what part. all of our songs are pretty long, and as we continue playing them we’re a little more able to take a step back and figure out when that length is the right fit for the song versus when it’s borderline gratuitous. i’ll also swap out lyrics a lot as we play live and continuously try to edit. the screams at the end of the last song (“witness”) were actually an improvisation at a show we’d played like a month before we recorded which i ended up liking enough to record.

As your debut EP, how did you want to approach bringing hollow earth to life? What kinds of things were you personally hoping to bring out of these songs? 

i’m always reluctant to record and release music. I hate self-promotion and I find it really daunting to try to make a static, immutable, ‘finished’ version of something so personal and so constantly in motion. The impetus to record came from the fact that both finn and lj are leaving the bay area within the next few months, and we wanted to have a record of this iteration of the project. Brad [Lincoln], who engineered the ep, wanted to capture as closely as possible the sound of us playing live, and we only added a few overdubs after the fact. 

Did documenting this iteration of towhead bring any comfort or confidence to making this EP happen, as you said you are reluctant to record and release music? 

definitely! i think if anything it paints the recordings as an etching of the love i have for finn and lj. regardless of how i felt about the recordings (which, to be fair, i do feel proud of in and of themselves), we all have a sort of time capsule. it was a massive part of shedding that feeling of dread enough to actually undertake the recording process. 

What can people expect from towhead going forward? 

i’m doing a solo tour on the east coast next month with finn and their partner emily’s project imy3, we have a small west coast tour in the works for the summer, and there are a few songs on the back burner that we’ll hopefully be able to record together before the two of them move. beyond that, the project is going to continue, albeit with lineup changes. there is always stuff in the works, and ideally it’ll take less time to come to fruition than hollow earth did.

You can listen to Hollow Earth out everywhere now, as well as purchases a cassette and CD copy of the EP.

Written by Shea Roney