WATCH: Common Holly Shares ‘Terrible hands’

New album, Anything glass, out June 13

May 21, 2025May 21, 2025 Ron Hart 0 Comments 2025, Ana-Maria Trudel, Anything glass, Bill Callahan, Brigitte Naggar, Common Holly, Leonard Cohen, Mount Eerie, Terrible Hands

Brigitte Naggar is Common Holly. (Image: Bandcamp)

Montreal’s Brigitte Naggar is back under the aegis of her nom de plume Common Holly with a new album to be released on June 13.

Entitled Anything glass, this forthcoming collection of songs is Naggar’s third under the Common Holly handle, cut live in the studio with her touring band in a bid to give these tunes the sonic immediacy they require.

Naggar describes the forthcoming record as “intimate, full of silence and space, warm, gentle, and sometimes spiky.”

Co-produced with longtime collaborator Devon Bate, echoes of such influences as Mount Eerie, Leonard Cohen and Bill Callahan float within the colors of these 10 new songs. Namely the album’s latest single “Terrible hands,” a piano jazz pop number that speaks to our current collective consciousness about our place in this world.

Common Holly Anything glass, Keeled Scales/Paper Bag Records 2025

“One of my oldest songs on the record, ‘Terrible hands’ is a reflection on our place as humans on a planet in decline, as part nature and part consumer, and on the ways we carry shame for choices we have made both knowingly and unknowingly,” she explains, adding how “the bloodstained hands of Lady Macbeth” appeared in her mind while writing the song.

“I think for me the most honest way to convey a message is through contradiction, through the interplay of dark and light, because only featuring one of the two extremes feels like there’s something that isn’t being said. In this song I speak of shame and guilt but deliver these feelings in an uplifting and gentle melody, and through an easy and familiar set of repeating chords. There wasn’t any great plan or intention at the outset of the writing, but I imagine the song must have come out of a moment of overwhelm in contemplating climate collapse. Anything will contain the potential for both heaviness and levity.”

Illustrating the sentiments of “Terrible hands” is a hypnotic video directed by filmmaker and multimedia artist Ana-Maria Trudel, which Rock & Roll Globe is honored to share today on the site.

“I was thinking of the sun faded quality of an old newspaper left on the dashboard — images that get prettier when they are forgotten,” Trudel said. “I wanted this video to feel nostalgic and delicate like a private journal entry you never meant to show anyone. We ended up using a lot of the b-roll to stitch this video poem together which gave it an intimate fly on the wall feel.”

“I loved working with Ana-Maria on a video that gives us this contrast between black and white brutalism and enjoying a nice day in the park,” adds Naggar.

“Terrible hands” is out May 21st via Keeled Scales and Paper Bag Records.