The Hold Room
Please Hold is a Manchester-based duo consisting of Kev and Shaz, two former customer service agents who spent a combined fourteen years on the phones for a now-defunct telecom company. They met during a training session on 'empathy statements' and bonded over the realization that the hold music loop in their headsets had a perfect four-on-the-floor rhythm. When the call center closed in 2019, they salvaged the server rack, the headset cords, and a hard drive full of recorded greetings, apologies, and transfer notifications. Their studio is the old break room, still smelling of instant coffee and despair.
Their music is built on upbeat, synth-driven dance tracks with playful, rhythmic vocals. The vocals are lines that are meant to invoke the feeling that you've heard them before they are so on the nose. They insist it's pure nonsense, a Dadaist collage. But listeners keep finding patterns: references to surveillance, alienation, the quiet violence of corporate language. Kev and Shaz just shrug. 'If you think there's a message,' they say, 'maybe you're the one who needs to hold.'
They have no released music yet, only a live set performed from a replica cubicle. But the whispers are already starting.
