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Jul 20, 2026 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Bobbie Knopp

Indie singer/songwriter Aymen Saleh began recording as Holy Pinto while living in the UK, debuting with his 2016 album Congratulations before following in 2019 with his sophomore record, Adult. Those records found Saleh leaning into an expressive, energized style of indie rock, shading his confessional songwriting with arrangements that shifted between punk, emo, and tuneful guitar pop. Saleh is now based out of Milwaukee, which served as the name for his 2020 record, documenting his transatlantic move.

Since then, Saleh has spent the intervening years steadily crafting his forthcoming full-length album, Wedding Season, due out later this year. The record came together piecemeal, with some tracks beginning in Washington D.C. with Bartees Strange, others in Saleh’s Milwaukee apartment, and still others through a series of sessions in unconventional locales. Saleh announced the album last month with his latest single, “One Tattoo,” and today he’s back with an early listen to another new single, “Billboard,” premiering with Under the Radar.

Where “One Tattoo” was a charming, loping singalong, “Billboard” is a sparse and aching piano ballad, bringing Saleh’s pained vocals to the forefront. Saleh colors his spotlit vocals with meditative drums and winding pedal steel, giving the arrangement an expansive cosmic country undercurrent, but he primarily anchors the track on the lyrics. Lyrically, the track reflects on the desire for escape, relying on the novelty of new experiences and places to stave off a deep internal hurt. Eventually, the excitement wears off only to find that you carried all of your baggage with you: “If I had a billboard to show the world / It would say never stay in one place for too long / The gift of the gamble has just disappeared / And all I can feel is terror this year / Wherever I leave / I take ‘me’ with me.”

Saleh says of the track, “‘Billboard’ is a song about how we can’t escape the stories we tell ourselves - no matter how much we change our surroundings, we take the same emotional landscape with us.

Check out the song below, along with Saleh’s thoughts on the track and album. Wedding Season is out everywhere on September 14th.

“Billboard” explores the emotional baggage we carry but rarely acknowledge. Was there a particular moment or realization in your own life that became the emotional starting point for the song?

It was a trip to Texas a few years ago - one I approached with a sense of hope and freedom, which just couldn’t be so. It truly felt like I just had to deal with myself first - that wherever I escape to or whatever I go to do, nothing will change.

Throughout Wedding Season, you weave together personal reflections with voices and moments collected from the people around you. How does “Billboard” fit into that larger conversation about identity, connection, and the stories we tell ourselves?

“Billboard” very much fits into the ‘stories we tell ourselves’ thread - it lives in the idea that we’re all anchored in a world of our own creation. The extreme of that being so mired in your own world that a change in setting creates no difference in experience… the song touches on that kind of rigidity/stuckness/despair. Towards the end of the song you can hear a quote I pulled from one of the earlier voice recordings on the record - ‘You think you’re over something, but it’s still going to dredge its head up in some ugly way’ - I feel like that’s the dark summation of the song.

You spent years refining Wedding Season, paying close attention to atmosphere and the smallest sonic details. Were there any production choices on “Billboard” that became essential to conveying the weight and vulnerability at the heart of the song?

Quite niche, but I really love the cymbal sounds on the recording. I borrowed my friend’s Byzance transition ride cymbal, and it really sung for me on this one! The brushes at the start felt essential for some reason - I asked a musician here in Milwaukee called Nick Lang to lay that down for me, and he did expertly. Since the song is emotionally/thematically set in Texas, having the pedal steel guitar on it (courtesy of Will Hansen) felt very right and necessary.