Holy Ghost !

New York natives Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser shifted from hip-hop work in Automato toward electronic post-disco and synth pop under the Holy Ghost! name, an outfit backed by the DFA label. Between 2007 and 2016 the multi-instrumentalist pair issued seven singles and two albums on DFA—the partly compiled Holy Ghost! in 2007 and Dynamics in 2013—while signaling their early-eighties club roots through a visual nod to New Order’s “Confusion” and a version of Ministry’s “I Wanted to Tell Her.” After that DFA stretch, Frankel and Millhiser assisted in bringing the storied New York disco imprint West End Records back to life on their third album, Work, released in 2019.

Friends since elementary school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the two had belonged to the rap outfit Automato, whose final releases, among them a self-titled 2003 album, were produced by DFA’s James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy. Once Automato ended, Murphy and Goldsworthy steered Frankel and Millhiser further into dance music, resulting in the 2007 DFA single “Hold On,” which the pair co-produced with the two DFA principals under the Bar-Kays-referencing alias Holy Ghost!. Their next release, “I Will Come Back,” appeared in 2009 as a joint DFA and Green Label Sound effort and drew attention for its video remake of New Order’s “Confusion,” with producer Arthur Baker again in his original role. The four-track Static on the Wire EP followed in 2010, underscoring the duo’s knack for summoning the layered, vivid textures of early- to mid-eighties club music, while the self-titled 2011 album gathered earlier tracks and featured Michael McDonald on the closing cut “Some Children.”

By that point Holy Ghost! had also become frequent remixers, reworking material by MGMT, Moby, Cut Copy, Phoenix, the Juan MacLean, and James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem. For Green Label Sound they supplied a fresh take on Ministry’s “I Wanted to Tell Her” with vocals from DFA associates Nancy Whang and Juan Maclean. Whang and Kelley Polar numbered among the contributors to the comparatively band-oriented Dynamics, issued on DFA in 2013. Following the 2016 Crime Cutz EP, activity slowed until Frankel and Millhiser aligned with the revived West End label for the 2018 Anxious EP, which included its title track, a Tom Moulton mix, and the duo’s own remix of the Chuck Davis Orchestra’s 1977 West End A-side “Spirit of Sunshine.” They also scored the documentary Chef Flynn that year, and Work arrived on West End the next.