Coming up in the Connecticut DIY scene, Jarett Denner and Dan Poppa lacked community. They made friends online or with out-of-town bands passing through on tour, their local scene too stagnant to support their ambitions. The pair began performing as waveform* while still in high school, writing and recording hushed acoustic sketches from their bedrooms. Their early work reeked of their idols, namely Alex G, who they both clearly admire; it’s impossible to ignore the uncanny similarities between waveform*’s 2018 album library with Alex G’s Trick and DSU—the pitch-shifted vocals, the sparse guitar strums, the vague one-word song titles. Denner and Poppa expanded their range on 2019’s Shooting Star, elevating their withdrawn minimalism into melodic guitar pop that evoked acts like Hovvdy and Sparklehorse. On their newly remastered and reissued album Last Room, waveform* further explore the boundaries of indie rock without ever quite settling into a cogent identity of their own.
Last Room’s strongest moments are spackled with soothing guitar and sullen melodies, a sense of longing and despair simmering below the surface. “Miner’s Lullaby” repeats a haunting line—“you’re trying to fall inside”—over an American Football-esque riff and a slowly disintegrating drum loop. On “Favorite Song,” Denner’s flat, wistful voice slinks across slide guitar and grand piano, crooning lyrics so specific and pitch-perfect they feel plucked straight from his subconscious: “I want to hear you complain about things/I want to hear you play video games.” waveform*’s music aches with immediacy and desire, their best songs locating the gray area between wanting to get out of bed and wanting to press your face into a pillow.
The duo’s songwriting doesn’t always possess an appropriate heft, though. Teen romance, bad fathers, unrequited love—these topics can certainly be rendered with profundity, but without the proper details they can read like one-dimensional diary entries. Take horrorcore ballad “Book of Curse,” for example, in which Poppa mutters, “I might love her/She made me sad/Yeah, she hurt me.” It’s a song like no other in their catalog—eerie and unsettling, a blend of Nick Cave and Lil Peep. But the song never fully clicks into focus; the experimentation feels like experimentation, the emotions immaterial.
Throughout the album, waveform* are determined to escape their heads but unable to do so. Even on the record’s more upbeat songs, like “Blue Disaster,” the duo sinks into solipsism: “I'm a winner when I'm all alone/I've gone years never finding home.” There’s little reprieve from this solitude, no dramatic arc to alleviate the suffering. The album’s lone moment of catharsis arrives on “Hello Goodbye,” a song Denner says is about “struggling with sexuality.” With a twang remnant of Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Denner gives a remarkable vocal performance, his stirring falsetto offering a sense of release. He’s still in his head, but he’s intent on moving outward and telling someone else how he feels, no matter how painful the excavation may be.
In an interview from last year, waveform* were asked what place or feeling they thought their music embodied. “I guess to me it couldn't really be pinpointed to anything specific,” Poppa said. “Hopefully being in the forest temple from Ocarina of Time or something,” added Denner. It’s telling that, even to them, their sound is rudderless, breezy enough to belong anywhere or niche enough to play in a Nintendo 64 game. While Last Room succeeds in bringing virtuosity and vitality to a certain strain of downcast rock, its lack of direction prevents waveform* from homing in on a sound truly unburdened by their predecessors.
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