RIVAL SONS' SCOTT HOLIDAY: 'In Our Line Of Work And This Job, It's Really Easy To Become An Accidental Alcoholic'

In a recent interview with SPIN, RIVAL SONS guitarist Scott Holiday opened up about how he ditched alcohol and the impact it's had on his life. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I didn't have any hitting-rock-bottom moment. I know a lot of people do, and those stories are valuable, but I wanted to tell you just a different story where it doesn't require to hit rock bottom.

"In our line of work and this job, it's really easy to become an accidental alcoholic — a drink before the show, a couple of drinks after the show, maybe a couple of more before you go down, and it's just day after day after day, and you're not feeling like you're binge drinking, but then you end the tour and you come home and you start looking and calculating and you're, like, 'I think I drank every single day. I'm pretty sure that is alcoholism,'" he explained. "And then if you spice in a little bit of drugs into that, you're just going, 'Well, this is a lot of damage.' And there was a lot of hungover days here. And for me, I just ended up feeling really disconnected, if I really looked at myself. I felt like I wasn't taking in all these beautiful places I was seeing."

He continued: "I have a family at home. I felt I couldn't be ready whenever I needed to be ready. Like if I'm in Europe and one of my kids needs to talk to me in their normal daytime, that's 3:30 in the morning for me. If I'm seven drinks down, it's just not coherent enough; it's not how I wanna perform for them; it's not how I wanna be available. But even more importantly, just for myself. I have this great opportunity to play music for people, and more than just fire people up on rock and roll, I see it very much as a thing with —like Paramatma, if I take something from Hindu culture, where when we're on deck and you're playing music with people, there's a very symbiotic thing happening with everyone. And it becomes less about all these people partying and having this good time and individual people. And you can kind of see people very connected as souls, very similar. We're all doing the same thing at the same time. And even us — we're facilitating that; they're facilitating us. No one's really in charge here, even though it looks like we're in charge. We've all kind of come together to do this thing together — to sing together, to feel something together. And I'll tell you, it's a lot easier to feel that happening in sobriety. And that was a big deal for me."

RIVAL SONS' latest album, "Lightbringer", arrived on October 20. It notably marked the group's second full-length offering of 2023, following June's critically acclaimed companion album "Darkfighter".

RIVAL SONS crafted "Darkfighter" and "Lightbringer" during the same sessions over the course of 2021. Once again, they recorded with creative confidant and longtime producer Dave Cobb behind the board. The band initially dropped "Darkfighter" to unanimous tastemaker praise this summer. Classic Rock attested, "'Darkfighter' might just be RIVAL SONS' masterpiece," and Glide Magazine enthused, "'Darkfighter' is a lean hard rock album that condenses what RIVAL SONS does well into a brief attack." At the same time, they have piled up millions of streams across the likes of "Nobody Wants To Die", "Bird In The Hand", "Rapture" and more.

RIVAL SONS recently concluded a tour with THE SMASHING PUMPKINS and stayed on the road through the end of 2023 with select U.S. headline shows and festival appearances.

In 2021, RIVAL SONS celebrated the tenth anniversary of their 2011 album, "Pressure And Time", by performing the landmark long player live in its entirety on the "Pressure And Time" tour for the first time. They also lit up Southern California with a two-night livestream event, "Pair Of Aces", live from the historic Catalina Casino on Santa Catalina Island. They performed their debut LP, "Before The Fire" (2009),in its entirety on the first night and their self-titled EP, "Rival Sons" (2010),on the second.