Holy Wars: “Do I want to talk about death forever? Not at all. I just don’t know what else to say”

• Get your super-limited-edition Holy Wars vinyl bundle now

Kat was born for the stage. Her mother Sharon started with plans of being a nun, but eventually traded those for dreams of becoming one of Radio City’s precision dancers The Rockettes. Meeting Kat’s father David was key to that change of heart: a “cigarette-smoking race car driver” whose cover band The Scorpions even once received a cease-and-desist letter from the German originals.

One of Kat’s earliest memories is being three years old, seeing her older sister – her “idol” – dancing in front of an audience for the first time. Within 24 months, she too had thrown herself into theatre and dance. Writing her own songs inspired by heroes like Radiohead, Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette would facilitate a sideways step into the more purely musical world, but taking part in a song competition with Alice Cooper on the judging panel would be truly formative.

“He asked me, ‘What’s your story? Are you in a band?’” she remembers. “That experience gave me this unapologetic confidence to do it. I was so green, but that can be a beautiful place from which to start because you have no fear at all, you don’t know how long or hard the road can be.”

Kat half-laughs that first band Sad Robot was her “growing years, where you say to people, ‘Don’t look over there!’” But it also honed her musical ability and, via auditions, led the most important person in her life to her front door: musical/life partner, and second half of Holy Wars, Nick Perez.

“Then in 2015, both of my parents died,” she emphasises how abruptly the rug was pulled. “My mom had been sick, a five-year illness called [cardiac] sarcodosis: a kind of autoimmune condition which causes pulmonary hypertension and for which there is no real cure. My dad was completely unexpected. We’d gotten to a point with my mom where they told her that she had six months to live, with a heart transplant having a 20-30 per cent chance of success. They’d done a procedure with a kind of balloon inflated inside her heart to give us time to decide what to do, and my dad had to mix her medicine daily to store in the fridge – or drive 90 minutes to the hospital for it. I guess he was under a lot of pressure, and he dropped dead of a heart attack three days later.”

Kat pauses a moment, still shaken by the memory. Then she goes on. Her father died on Saturday, April 25. She said goodbye to her mom on another sorrowful Saturday: October 10 that same year.

“It’s funny,” the words spill out. “Well, it’s not funny. It’s fucked-up. But my mom didn’t want the transplant and she just went on morphine to the point where she wasn’t really with me those last six months. Going through both, I think I had a harder time with my father’s abrupt death than my mother’s long, drawn out passing. At my mom’s memorial service, I overheard one of my cousins saying, ‘Well, she loved her dad more because she cried at his memorial but not her mom’s…’ That was disgusting behaviour. At least with my mom I knew that she wasn’t in pain anymore.”

Kat’s own pain was only just beginning, however. Looking back at the period between 2015 and 2017 there are memories that pierce the veil – going from living with her folks to walking around their house all alone, arranging funerals, clearing out their possessions with Nick, selling the old family home – but most of that time is lost in what became a sickening swirl of depression.

“I wasn’t really there,” she nods. “Not to make it too heavy, but I had a lot of dark thoughts and thought that maybe my time was up. I cut off all my hair, I dyed it blonde, I couldn’t even think of myself as my parents’ daughter anymore. I couldn’t look in the mirror and see them but know that they weren’t here. My sister tried to be there for me but she was in the process of going through a divorce and becoming a single mother. I was on suicide watch. Full disclosure, I tried to [kill] myself in my own way, but I didn’t have the courage to do it.

“Both of those deaths defined my life in a way that I will probably never fully comprehend. They left me questioning my own existence, having the worst thoughts about myself and everything around me…”

Beginning to write again, Kat never had the vision of incepting another “project” for release. Music had become intertwined with pain. She was aware how it sparked unhealthy tunnel-vision. There was a “quest for worthiness” where she equated winning fans with peace and acceptance.

“When I started writing it was just about wanting to heal. I’d told my friends that I was making music, but that it was just for me. But then we got an opportunity to open Los Angeles’ [780-cap] Echoplex. I talked to Nick about it and he said, ‘If the idea scares you, you should give this music a stage for one night.’ If it didn’t go well, we never needed to do it again. But it did go well. People were asking, ‘Who are you?!’ and, ‘What’s your band name?’ We’d only picked Holy Wars to have a name to go on the flyers. Little did I know how many angry Megadeth fans [confused by echoes of the thrash icons’ shreddy 1990 classic Holy Wars… The Punishment Due] I’d encounter after that!”

Really, the band name was inspired by a couple of factors. First in Kat’s mind is her estranged, 12-years-older brother, who cut himself off from the family when he married into a “cult-like” Christian sect and they refused to follow. Kat was raised Catholic – as was Nick, from a prayer-candle lit traditional Mexican background – but their outlook nowadays is more “spiritual” than “religious”.

It's particularly evident in the band’s fascination with life’s dualities. It can be focused on the well-known interconnected forces – yin and yang, darkness and light – but it’s more intriguingly applied to their lived experience. Kat was born on America’s east coast, in Connecticut, for instance, but settled in California with the rest of her kin, as they followed a grandmother who’d divorced and moved west to start a whole new family. 2017’s debut EP Mother Father explored the contrasting losses of both parents. 2022’s first album EAT IT UP SPIT IT OUT cast its gaze more broadly, critiquing the modern appetite for quantity over quality.

“I’m fascinated by the polarity,” Kat explains. “I don’t force it, I just feel it. It’s about existentialism. After losing my parents I became obsessed with identity and stripping away all the masks we wear – daughter, musician, friend, lover – to find the freedom in how we are all the same energy manifesting in different ways. Knowing that gives so much freedom, and understanding that one thing can’t exist without the other: no feminine without the masculine, no light without the dark.”

After abandoning earlier hopes of being a nun, Kat’s mom became a renowned Tarot reader. Fashionable as it is today, this was not the norm in Connecticut at the end of the 20th century, and before long she would have people coming from as far as New York to have their futures read – with alarming accuracy. Her dad would pepper his own traditional prayer with announcements like ‘I’m a warlock with intuition!’ Holy Wars' current logo is a version of the Tarot’s Three Of Swords – a card with three blades piercing a heart symbolising heartbreak, emotional pain, sorrow and separation – which also came to represent Kat’s three family members lost to cardiac illness.

“Losing my sister blindsided me,” says the singer, her emotions rising up as she recalls how she was plunged back into pain, seeing her sibling taken by the same condition as their mother. “She kept a lot of it from me, but she was in her 40s and on oxygen. In May 2024 she was back in Connecticut and called to ask if I would fly out to take her to some appointments. I had a feeling that something was wrong, but I didn’t want to pry, and I felt a guilt that she had this illness at a time when I did not. I booked to be there for three weeks around my niece’s high school graduation.

“Then I got a message from my sister a week before the graduation saying, ‘I don’t feel so good, light a candle for me, I’m going to the hospital…’ So I lit a candle and pulled some cards. Mom and dad’s cards came out immediately and I said, ‘I think they’re there with you. Everything is going to be okay.’ She didn’t come out again.

“From what I understand, she passed right there in the ambulance. I was so angry that she didn’t have a better life. Even when she was young she lost her boyfriend to his own heart problems aged, like, 23. By her 40s, she was waiting for a heart transplant that never came. To this very moment, I feel sick in my stomach that she didn’t get a happier ending.”

Compared to the “Fisher Price riot grrrl” of older material like 1% MILK and TV DINNER, these songs have far more weight and depth. Shadowalker is a slamming anthem to the struggle within, Kat’s lyrics about ‘Waiting for someone to save me’ at odds with her belief that we must save ourselves, in her case by letting go of ghosts still walking beside her. Holy Unholy is about her brother, and how religion can be a mask for narcissism. O Death, named after the traditional Appalachian folk song, is actually about ego death, based on a mushroom trip she took prior to her sister’s passing.

“I thought I’d dropped into nothingness, which was terrifying,” she laughs. “Is this heaven? Is this hell? Is this purgatory? Whatever this void is, please never put me there. I wish I had the Ring camera footage from our Airbnb at Joshua Tree. I felt like I was in a maze with all these doorways which kept leading me back in, but I was probably going back and forth through the same door!”

Indeed, decamping to Joshua Tree was integral to how recording panned out, removing Kat and Nick from the noise of Los Angeles where they rep Holy Wars, but also write for upcoming artists and TV/film soundtracks under a solo Kat Leon banner and as Pep Squad. Although this is her story, she stresses that Nick came into his own as a multi-instrumentalist. Kat can play piano and guitar, but her partner produced and played virtually everything here, channelling everyone from Linkin Park and My Chemical Romance to Spiritbox and Sleep Theory. And it made room for tracks that exist outside the darkness, like I.F.O.Y.G. (I Fuck On Your Grave) and the raunchy Skin Deep.

“Our manager didn’t think they fit,” Kat grins, “but I snuck them in. I love the slinky side of things!”

So, where does Holy Wars’ alt.metal crusade go from here? Concluding with almighty highlight Metamorphosis, Shadow Work / Light Work leaves off with a suggestion of rebirth. Throughout our conversation, Kat notes how unhealthy the symbiosis between her grief and her music can be. Although the cost of travel in 2026 might curtail plans for the duo and touring members Matt Cohen (bass) and Johnny Tuosto (drums) to endlessly hit the road – Download 2025 having been their first UK show – she would perhaps like to travel on her own terms, seeing a world that her sister and parents never got the chance to, maybe even exploring her Scottish-Irish-Polish-German heritage. Regardless of all that, though, her obsession with these songs is inescapable, and she is at peace that music will be the rest of her life. Hopefully it can bring peace to others’ lives, too.

“I’ve felt so alone,” she signs off. “I’m looking forward to finding a bigger family of fans. Maybe that’s selfish. But if the people in those rooms are seeking the same thing it could be truly beautiful. I want people who don’t have words for these feelings to find a band that does, like I did with MCR or Evanescence. Our first song was called I Can’t Feel A Thing. Ten years later, we’re playing one called I Feel Everything. Getting to that point has been about not forgetting the person I was while allowing myself to heal and move forward as those people I’ve lost would want me to.

“Do I want to talk about death forever? Not at all. At this point I just don’t know what else to say. I never want people to think, ‘She’s telling me my parents are gonna die!’ They are, but that’s not the point. It’s more about the freedom to live knowing our days aren’t guaranteed. A kid interviewed me for her high school paper, asking what to do after she’d lost her mom. I told her just to write down the things she misses most, because there are things that I am beginning to forget. Like how I won’t know what my mom’s hands looked like – until I look down at my own.

“Time heals, but memories come and memories go. In that, maybe holding on to those memories is what will always define me, because I never want to let them go...”

Shadow Work / Light Work is released April 24. Get your super-limited-edition vinyl bundle now.

Read this next:

• “I wondered if the universe was telling me something”: How Holy Wars turned pain into hope
• Spiritbox: “Every time I walk out onstage, I can’t believe this is my life”
  
• A deep dive into Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life video