Why does U.K. band Brown Horse have a song called “Radio Free Bolinas”? With its ominous, roaming guitar riff and rangy bass, the track is one of my favorites.
“I wrote that one after reading loads of Richard Brautigan,” says guitarist Nyle Holihan of the Bolinas-based writer. “[His] apocalyptic hippie visions of California really impacted me.”
Soon, the English group’s visions of uncanny California will come true: This May, Brown Horse launches its first U.S. tour to promote its new album, Total Dive, with stops in Los Angeles, Ojai, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver.
For the hardworking bunch—which also includes Patrick Turner, Emma Tovell, and Rowan Braham—the opportunity to tour the West Coast is a long-held dream.
“We basically saved up for the last nine months to go to the U.S.,” says Tovell, who plays pedal and lap steel guitars, banjo, and bass—and also works as an ecologist. All of the members of Brown Horse have day jobs: Holihan works in disability support for the U.K. government, Braham runs a small music venue and bar in Norwich, and Turner works in a retail shop. “I never realized that people who are touring this much would also be professionals in a completely different career,” Tovell adds. “Nyle’s been working full-time nonstop since we started doing this.”
Already friends, the future bandmates began rehearsing together in 2017. They practiced country and folk classics, eventually starting to write their own music. “From playing all those old-time songs at open mics and fumbling through, I think we learned a lot about how we like songs to be structured,” says Tovell. “We’re really in each other’s pockets.”
Brown Horse describes its songs as “poem[s] set to music,” with sensitive lyrics that evoke the texture of memory and the passage of time. (An example from its 2025 song “Corduroy Couch”: “We watched The Matrix on a corduroy couch / The smell of the ocean was drying on your skin / Your big retriever’s name was Hank / And I know I’ll miss him.”)
“Some of our songs sound like a folk song where I’ve tried to jam in a Smashing Pumpkins guitar solo halfway through,” Holihan says. At the same time, the band loves Americana, from the Carter Family to Emmylou Harris.
Total Dive, Brown Horse’s third album, comes on the heels of its breakthrough sophomore record, All the Right Weaknesses (2025). Like its predecessor, Total Dive features dreamlike lyrics, tender vocal harmonies, and crunchy distortion. (“You spoke a new word that rhymed right with the feeling / I watch my face change in the mirror by the bar,” Turner sings on the single “Twisters.”) But the sound of Total Dive is richer, which Braham, who plays accordion, keyboards, and piano, attributes to better instruments and recording equipment. Tovell was able to play the lap steel guitar in addition to the larger, more complex pedal steel guitar. The band also had the benefit of time: While its first album, Reservoir (2024), was recorded in three days, Brown Horse spent two weeks in the studio cutting Total Dive. “It felt like a huge luxury,” says Tovell.
The band’s productivity is remarkable: “I think in a lot of ways it’d be harder if we weren’t doing an album a year,” Holihan says. “You write an album, you get to do another year of touring. If we don’t do the touring, then we stop and then other demands will take over. There is a real, practical, almost office-job element to running a band.”
Intrinsic to the success of Brown Horse’s Americana-influenced rock is its collaborative songwriting process. “We are very much each our own individual songwriters with shared tastes,” says Turner, a guitarist and the lead vocalist. “We bring each of our individual songs together, and then we talk about them going through the Brown Horse machine.”
For Turner, the West Coast tour is a return of sorts. He spent the 2015–2016 academic year as an undergraduate exchange student at San Francisco State University. “Rowan visited and we saw Jonathan Richman at Make Out Room in San Francisco,” he says. “If you told me 10 years ago that we would be back having formed a band, playing the same venue, I would have just found it completely unbelievable.”•
Lisa Locascio Nighthawk is the chair of the Antioch MFA and the executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times, and Electric Literature. Her first novel, Open Me, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. She writes a newsletter called Not Knowing How.
