He has his own record label and his band went on tour. He’s a junior in college.
by Al Shipley
Published November 9 in The Baltimore Banner
Holden Wolf was 15 years old when he founded a record label and started releasing songs he’d written. Even as an unusually industrious and creative teenager, however, he didn’t put much thought into the band name Combat. “I just wanted to upload it to Bandcamp so I just chose a word, not thinking that I’d have to stick with it,” Wolf said. “It was a decision probably made in the span of 30 seconds, not thinking that I’d ever have to think about it ever.”
Combat’s name might leave you expecting something a little heavier or more aggressive than the bright, catchy melodies and disarmingly honest lyrics on the Baltimore band’s second album, “Stay Golden.” “People definitely usually assume we’re a hardcore band,” Wolf told me on a recent afternoon on a park bench in Fells Point, not far from where he went to elementary school and met Combat bassist Josh Bell in second grade. “I think it has worked for us a little bit, because it makes it more intriguing, and it’s also easier to remember.”
To promote “Stay Golden” this fall, Wolf took a gap semester at Towson University, where he is studying to become a high school history teacher. The 20-year-old’s lyrics get at how overwhelming trying to do it all can be.
On the album’s single, “Epic Season Finale,” he sings: “I feel like quitting everything / School, job and music industry isn’t made out for me.” But he doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon. Combat, which has recently received national press, played shows across the country on a “big, long” tour throughout October, including an appearance at The Fest, an annual punk festival in Gainesville, Florida.
It’s not really a new scene for Wolf, a second-generation Baltimore punk rocker. His father, Mike Wolf, played in bands like The Allied War Effort and co-founded Charm City Art Space, the Station North venue that hosted over a thousand punk shows from 2002 to 2015. So Holden Wolf grew up looking up to Baltimore bands like Oxes and Ponytail.
“Epic Season Finale” features one prominent Baltimore indie scene shout out, with a refrain that namechecks Dan Deacon. “It just came into the song naturally, it just felt normal,” Wolf said of the lyric. “I’ve not really lived anywhere else, and I think about being here a lot. Whatever I wrote was just kind of what I was thinking about.”
Wolf’s evangelical enthusiasm for music has always spread easily among his friends, and Combat had as many as 12 members at some of the band’s wild early shows. “When I met Holden, I knew him a few months and then he was like, ‘Do you want to be in this band?’ ” said guitarist Max Slavich. In the past three years, Combat pared down to a core quintet of Wolf, Slavich, Bell, drummer Isabella DeVarona and guitarist Devon Khan, all of whom are between 20 and 22 years old.
Though Combat is signed to one of Wolf’s favorite labels, the Boston-based Counter Intuitive Records, Wolf is still running his own label, Soursop Records, which has released other musical projects by the members of Combat, including Hain’s Point and Inner Oral Photography. Wolf, Bell and DeVarona all play in Dakota Condition, continuing to explore the more abrasive, freeform sounds that typified early Combat. “It’s like noise rock, post-hardcore kind of stuff, which is what, initially, me and Josh really wanted to do with our lives, making really heavy music,” Wolf said.
“We were really big into Double Dagger,” he said of the Baltimore post-punk band that broke up in 2011.
“Huge,” Bell concurred.
“Inspiring others musically or to start a band is one of the biggest compliments a band like Double Dagger can receive,” Double Dagger drummer Denny Bowen said via email from Atlanta, where he lives now. “That was very much a pillar of the DD ethos: what we do creatively shouldn’t exist in a vacuum, but instead continue on and take new shapes. So that is very flattering to hear. From the live videos I’ve seen of Combat on YouTube, they got that tightl-wound nervous energy thing going where it seems like the band members could spontaneously combust at any moment, which is really cool. I could see that as something we possibly have imparted to them.”
“Stay Golden” explodes with energy, personality and emotion, and several songs run under two minutes in the age-old punk rock tradition. And then there’s “Weird Ending Explained, Pt. 1″ and “Weird Ending Explained, Pt. 2,” two complex epics that each run over seven minutes. DeVarona, whose propulsive drumming gives Combat’s songs an irrepressible forward motion, rose to the occasion of recording those songs in one take after the band mapped out all the twists and turns of the arrangements in their recording software. “The hardest thing was the tempo map,” she said. “There’s a bunch of odd tempo changes, and it’s not static ones; it slows down or speeds up.”
Some of the members of Combat aren’t old enough to drink yet, which has sometimes made it hard for them to play in Baltimore, where many of the venues are bars. “For a long time, we’d go to New Jersey like every other weekend to play shows, because we just wanted to play shows really bad, and just couldn’t do it here,” Wolf said. But they do enjoy playing at local all-ages venues like The Undercroft, a Remington church basement that’s been hosting rock shows since 2017. Since early 2023, the members of Combat are part of the group running the Undercroft, which has become the band’s de facto home base.
They played a release party show for “Stay Golden” at the Undercroft in August, which was going to be the band’s last Baltimore show for a while. Then the Florida band Camp Trash played a last-minute “secret show” at the venue in September, and Combat jumped on the bill to play an atypical set featuring songs that will likely eventually appear on their next album. “It was a weird setlist. We played mostly unreleased stuff, then we played two released songs and then ‘Maps’ by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” Bell said.
Now that Combat has a burgeoning fan base that wants to hear songs from the band’s albums on tour, they have to pick their moments to test out new material. But they still play what they want and don’t worry about pleasing the crowd. The setlist “was mostly for our own enjoyment,” Wolf said. He’s ready to make the hometown fans miss Combat a little, though. “We want our show back to be, like, a really big one, where all the Baltimore people have been wanting us to play and we finally did.”
This story was republished with permission from The Baltimore Banner.
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