Holland Andrews

Holland Andrews is an American singer, composer, performance artist, and clarinetist. A solo artist who has previously performed under the name Like A Villain, their style of music draws from contemporary opera, musical theater, jazz, ambient and noise music. They also compose music for dance, theater, and film.

Known for their long, improvised live sets and cinematic music, Andrews's albums are The Life of a Gentleman (2010), Bast (2014), and What Makes Vulnerability Good (2019). They have been reviewed in The Wire, the New York Times, Le Monde, La Repubblica, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, Electronic Sound, Uncut, and BBC Radio.

In 2025, Andrews was announced as a Guggenheim Fellow.

Early life Born in 1988 and raised in Los Angeles, California, Holland Andrews comes from a family of singers that included their mother, sisters, and cousins. Their mother and sister released the songs "What's Your Game" and "Running and Pushing" as the group MDLT Willis. The quietest voice in the tightly knit group, Andrews also attended musical theater camp with one of their sisters.

Andrews' mother was troubled, suffering from schizoaffective disorder, as well as alcohol and drug abuse. At that point Andrews checked themself into rehab.

In 2013, they began a residency to create a musical piece for the avant-garde Time-Based Art Festival, administered by the Portland Institute For Contemporary Art (PICA). However, they were able to still independently release a second album of music, called Bast, that they recorded with Mike Erwin, and members of Typhoon, the Ocean Floor, Machinedrum, and others. There, they met Rwandan-born singer-songwriter and choreographer Dorothee Munyaneza, who they would eventually begin a collaboration. They toured internationally for two years. What Makes Vulnerability Good was released September 2019 on Accidental Records. "We were thinking of ways that transform and keep the listener interested without sacrificing who I am as an artist," they said about the use of synthesizer effects with arrangements that included guests like saxophonist Joe Cunningham (Blue Cranes). Lyrically, Andrews expounded on the relationship they had with their mother, among other personal topics. There You Are was created as Andrews's final work for their artist residency at ISSUE Project Room to supplement the online performances. These personalized performances were later a part of Darkness Sounding, a music festival organized by the Los Angeles ensemble, Wild Up. That year, Andrews also composed music for the documentary Beba.

In May 2023, Andrews presented work at the Virginia Commonwealth University's Institute for Contemporary Art. That same month they collaborated with Demian Dinéyazhi' in a closing performance for Dinéyazhi's exhibition "An Infected Sunset" at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in Los Angeles.

In addition, Andrews has collaborated with the experimental music project Son Lux (as a featured artist on the track “Sever”), William Brittelle, Christina Vantzou, Ryan Lott, West Dylan Thordson, and Peter Broderick. The piece was performed in October 2018 at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.

In 2018, Andrews performed as one of the vocalists in Gabriel Kahane’s Emergency Shelter Intake Form, a live piece of 13 vignettes with full orchestra that premiered at the Oregon Symphony. The concert, themed around homelessness, was performed at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park in Chicago the following year.

Andrews created the music soundtrack for the 2019 documentary, Zero Impunity by Nicolas Blies and Stéphane Hueber-Blies, a film that presented incidents of sexual violence in armed conflicts around the world. In September 2020, they along with other experimental musicians Justin Hicks and Alicia Hall Moran, provided the soundtrack for Lee Mingwei’s meditative performance installation, Our Labyrinth, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Choreographed by Bill T. Jones, their music accompanied various dancers as they swept mounds of rice around the floor in 90-minute intervals. That year, Andrews scored the music for Jones’ Afterwardsness dance piece, which was filmed at New York's Park Avenue Armory to lobby the New York state government for special permission to present reduced-capacity, socially-distanced performances due to COVID-19.

Andrews's collaborative work with dance and theater artists includes Outwalkers by Moya Michael in 2022 and Is It Thursday Yet? by Jenn Freeman and Sonya Tayeh in 2023.

Personal life Andrews is based in Brooklyn

In 2014, Andrews' house was robbed, including a computer with some of their early songs.