Biography

Holy Pinto is the indie-pop project led by British songwriter Aymen Saleh. It began in his hometown of Canterbury, England, and is now based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Starting out in the UK with a raw, youthful punk sound, Holy Pinto gradually evolved into colorful, genre-defying indie-pop. After falling in love with life on the road - through a mix of carefree independence and serendipitous moments - Saleh eventually made Milwaukee home.

They released their debut album “Congratulations” in 2016, earning acclaim from outlets like The A.V. Club and launching an extensive run of international touring. That momentum carried into 2019’s coming-of-age follow-up Adult, released shortly after Saleh settled stateside.

A shorter record titled “Milwaukee” followed in 2020, documenting the relocation to his new adopted hometown, drawing praise from local press and national outlets including NPR, who named Holy Pinto to their coveted SXSW “Austin 100” list.

Holy Pinto then teamed up with Bartees Strange in 2021 for the single “us, married.” Produced by Strange, the track marked a clear expansion in sonic scope, also shaped by Saleh’s pandemic-era collaborations across pop, hip-hop, and afrobeat.

That collaboration marked the beginning of a deeply self-explorative journey toward “Wedding Season” - a meticulous, years-long labour of love and ambitious concept album set for release in fall 2026.

“Sweetly jangling, good-natured Britpop - dispensed with abundant charm and grace, his songs feel warm and lived-in.” - Stephen Thompson, NPR

Wedding Season, LP#3, out Sept 14th:

Holy Pinto’s Aymen Saleh has never been one to rush an idea, but Wedding Season took its time even by his standards. Started in 2021 and labored over for years, the album is the most complete realization yet of Saleh’s particular songwriting instincts: funny and bruised, restless and intimate, full of wry detail, sharp left-turns and chummy wisdom. If earlier Holy Pinto releases introduced Saleh as a gifted indie songwriter with one foot in emo and another in classic indie-pop, Wedding Season is the fullest expression yet of his instincts as a songwriter, arranger and thinker.

Saleh grew up in Canterbury, England, started Holy Pinto there and eventually carried the project across the Atlantic, landing in Milwaukee and finding a city that made unexpected sense to him. He connected with its music scene, its bar culture and its blue-collar warmth. It’s the kind of city where it’s easy to meet people and easy to end up talking for hours. Wedding Season sounds like the product of exactly that kind of life: a record made by someone who listens closely, stores away stray remarks, and continually finds his own story refracted in other people’s.

That sense of connection is the heart of the album. Wedding Season is full of Saleh’s songs about love, distance, doubt and adulthood, but it is also threaded through with voices from outside his own head, including field recordings of late-night conversations with friends and kindred souls at neighboring bar stools. Saleh remains the central narrator, but he uses the people around him to complicate and echo his own experience.

Wedding Season is a meticulously assembled record. Saleh spent years tinkering with arrangements, reworking songs and chasing sounds that could not have been captured by simply plugging in a band and playing them straight. Some of the album began in the Washington, D.C. basement of Bartees Strange. Much of it was written and recorded in Saleh’s apartment above a Brady Street bar in Milwaukee, interspersed with DIY sessions in spaces including a rural Wisconsin boat warehouse, a southern Illinois cathedral and an industrial piano repair shop. Along the way, he became less interested in documenting songs in their simplest form than in building a record that could hold all the strange little details he wanted it to hold: room tone, overheard stories, bits of atmosphere, moments of humor, moments of panic and the ornamental flourishes that make a song feel inhabited.

You don’t have to strain to hear the touchpoints. There is some of Death Cab for Cutie’s clarity and emotional plainspokenness in Saleh’s songwriting, some of Ben Folds’ melodic bounce and piano-minded craft and a lot of Jens Lekman’s gift for turning awkward, funny, highly specific observations into something bigger and sadder than they first appear. But Wedding Season does not play like a neatly assembled set of influences. It sounds like one songwriter following his own thoughts farther than usual and refusing to stop when the songs get messier, stranger, or more revealing than expected.

After years of starting over, second-guessing himself and sitting with the material long past the point when most musicians would have rushed it out, Saleh landed at a document of one songwriter trying to make sense of his life by pulling other voices into the frame. It is patient, searching and obsessively assembled. It’s the work of an artist who kept obsessing at an idea until he finally cracked it.

-Evan Rytlewski