Holy Pinto, the project of British songwriter Aymen Saleh, has released the new album ‘Wedding Season’, along with a video for ‘us, against the world’.

Saleh began Holy Pinto in Canterbury before eventually settling in Milwaukee, and ‘Wedding Season’ has taken years to reach its finished form. Much of it was written and recorded in his apartment above a bar on Brady Street, with other sessions taking place in a Wisconsin boat warehouse, a cathedral in southern Illinois and an industrial piano repair shop.

‘us, against the world’ is one of the quieter songs on the record, beginning around piano before gradually opening up. Saleh traces some of its character back to the Elliott Smith songs he listened to growing up.

“I found a lot of Elliott Smith’s piano songs deeply moving growing up, especially the way he’d use waltz time to give them this dreamlike quality,” he says. “After recording this track, I realised I’d subconsciously written something of that spirit.”

The song is really about looking back at the beginning of something, before experience has had time to complicate it.

“The song is about nostalgia for the beginning of something, a partnership, a relationship, an idea, when there’s this boundless excitement, resilience and belief in what it could become,” Saleh explains.

He is careful not to suggest that what comes later is necessarily worse. The point is more that relationships gather history. Joy and closeness remain, but so do hurt, obstacles and periods of distance, and sometimes the uncomplicated beginning becomes something you miss.

Parts of ‘Wedding Season’ go back several years. Bartees Strange produced ‘Us, Married’ and also plays guitar on ‘Death Is In The Air’ and ‘us, against the world’. Elsewhere, Saleh kept returning to arrangements, changing parts and recording in whatever spaces gave the songs what they needed.

That long process suits a record concerned with partnership, memory and the way feelings change over time. It also explains why ‘Wedding Season’ doesn’t sound like an album made in one room or during one fixed period of Saleh’s life.