“This is a classic rock & roll tale,” Mike Montali, singer of the Queens rock & roll band Hollis Brown, says. “A guitarist with a big ego and a lead singer with a probably bigger ego can’t get on the same page and it takes one of the other band members to kind of facilitate it.”
In this case, it was Hollis Brown’s drummer Andy Zehnal who helped facilitate a truce between Montali and founding guitarist Jonathan Bonilla. It seems to have worked. On Friday, the group released their first new music since their acrimonious breakup in 2023. Titled “Garage Days,” it’s a callback to their formation as high-school students in Bonilla’s dad’s garage.
“Garage Days” is a blast of modern-day rock, with elements of U2 in both Montali’s voice and Bonilla’s reverberating guitar. “Run to the place that you feel most understood,” Montali sings, in an above-the-fray keen.
“It’s about getting back to the beginning a little bit and just seeing if we can start again and do it for the right reasons. We’re not doing it for the reasons of like, we got to make a living. We’re doing it like we were when we were 16 years old, just sitting around and playing instruments,” says Montali, who is also a member of the band Fantastic Cat.
Hollis Brown — who took their name from Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “Ballad of Hollis Brown” — first reunited back in March for a one-off show at the Wonder Bar in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Until Bonilla showed up onstage, Montali says he didn’t know if was going to happen, even after the pair sat down to clear the air a few weeks earlier.
“We met, and we had a big fight with just the two of us, no cameras, no people, no nothing. Just me and him sitting in a diner in Queens, yelling at each other,” he says.
After the Wonder Bar show, the pair went their separate ways, without a word.
“Nothing needed to be said,” Montali says. “Like many bands along their careers, we were faced with a path of we can put up a red light and stop, or we can put up the yield sign to proceed with caution. That’s what we’re doing.”
With caution, Hollis Brown have another show now on the books: Sept. 26 at New York’s Mercury Lounge.
