By Lillian Li
If you’ve been on the internet over the past few years, chances are you’ve heard “Soldier, Poet, King” by The Oh Hellos in some capacity.
While the song has recently reached new heights of popularity over TikTok, its original rise to internet fame can be traced to an animation meme on YouTube by the account Gothfrog in 2018. At the time of writing, the video sits at over a million views.
This is how The Oh Hellos came into my life and became one of my favorite bands of all time.
Allow me to clarify: I never considered myself a folk fan. In fact, I never considered the genre to begin with.
I was raised on rock and jazz. I grew to embrace alternative, indie and pop-rock as I grew older and waded further from my father’s taste and into the wide world of music.
So, imagine my surprise when I fell utterly and wildly in love with The Oh Hellos, an indie folk-rock band.
“Soldier, Poet, King,” enchanted me immediately. I found it akin to the fantasy genre, which is my favorite category of media and reminded me of a personal project I’ve been working on for years.
That instant, intimate connection I felt with their music buoyed me as I devoured their discography, becoming more and more enraptured with every new discovery. I found very quickly that “Soldier, Poet, King” merely scratched the surface of The Oh Hellos’ brilliance.
I value music that feels like a good book: thought-provoking, nuanced and intelligent. The Oh Hellos address ideas of the self, religion, and the human condition. They weave their lyrics and instrumentals together to not only tell a story but force the listener to experience it.
Something about the way The Oh Hellos compose each melody and present each lyric make the mundane feel spiritual and fantastical.
My favorite part of their discography is the “Four Winds” series, which is told in four parts–each part being a seven-song album with the four winds in Greek mythology as namesakes: “Notos,” “Eurus,” “Boreas” and “Zephyrus.”
“Four Winds” seeks to answer the quintessential question, as stated on their website: “where do our ideas come from?” It links mythology, folklore, and religion to examine how our beliefs are built, and how they change as our world widens.
Each album additionally coincides with a season, and once I associated each installment with its respective season, the narrative of “Four Winds” became much more personal.
What makes “Four Winds” so evocative to me is how each album feels so connected yet so separate. They each represent disparate stages of a person’s struggle to understand the origins of their reality, yet are united in a singular musical motif that transitions each album and changes with each season.
“May all our tinfoil idols lay crumpled on the ground, and our prefab Olympus divided by the thousand.”
The first time I watched The Oh Hellos perform live on YouTube, I cried. Their set at the Paradise Rock Club was punctuated by an interview with frontpeople Tyler and Maggie Heath, the Texan siblings who founded The Oh Hellos.
As they explained the thought behind “Dear Wormwood,” their second full-length album, everything fell in place for me. It was inspired by “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis and is a concept album telling a story of an abusive relationship.
Although I’ve never experienced partner abuse, I considered “Dear Wormwood” in a whole new light. I understood the depth of emotion the Heaths were trying to convey, and, armed with this new context, could fully grasp the story they wanted to tell. I had liked “Dear Wormwood” before–but now I felt as though I could truly love it.
“Could you love me more, if by the sun and moon I swore that I would never flee?”
I never expected to fall for The Oh Hellos. But I’m so, so glad I did because they’ve brightened my life in ways I never imagined. Their exuberant celebrations and their thoughtful ruminations are everything to me, but I can’t quite describe how.
Loving their music has just become as easy as breathing. My favorite album of theirs, Zephyrus, speaks of spring and rebirth. Of coming to terms with yourself, and all that has created you. I suppose, in a way, I’m working towards that myself–to finally, truly become well.
