One moment Kelly Zutrau’s standing tall, shoulders back and chin high, and the next she’s supine on the floor, unsure if she’ll ever stand again. The 34-year-old lead singer of the alt-pop trio Wet writes hopeful songs about heartbreak and loneliness, positioning despair as an enduring yet fleeting precursor to purpose. “I’m always interested in multiple feelings at once,” Zutrau said in a recent interview. “Not just a happy song, but happy and sad and guilty—those can all be true.” On their new EP, Pink Room, Wet forgo their trusted brand of synth-pop and make their most stripped-down songs yet, often leaving Zutrau alone with a guitar while she searches for reclamation. “I know these things, they come and go,” she repeats on “There’s a Light.” It sounds like she’s singing a hymn, a lilting brightness that inflects even her saddest lines.
Optimism-tinged anguish is a familiar theme for Wet. Their first two albums, 2016’s Don’t You and 2018’s Still Run, were breakup records that bluntly described the process of letting go of someone without succumbing to helplessness. Both bounced between dispassionate R&B and flat synth-pop, the music more theoretically interesting than emotionally affecting. For the first few years of their career, the band’s most compelling songs were remixes. Producers like Branchez and Jim-E Stack flipped the trio’s downtempo work into danceable pop, a welcome revelation for a group struggling to nail a cogent identity. On last year’s Letter Blue, their first project since exiting their deal with Columbia, Wet worked with producer Buddy Ross and Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear to shake up their once safe sound. The album’s best song is “Larabar,” a stunning piano ballad that sounds like it’s being played through a faulty tape deck. The song proved that the group had great work in them, or at least the ability to make something simple feel seismic.
Like “Larabar,” Pink Room abandons anything that gets in the way of Zutrau’s hushed melodies. The lo-fi EP plays like a series of demos—one song, “Blades of Grass,” actually is a Letter Blue demo—with thin acoustic guitars, subtle synth pads, and the occasional swell of strings the only support for Zutrau’s vocals. There’s a breezy, almost lullaby-like quality to her delivery and rhythms that leads to some moving moments. “Tell Me Why” evokes the sensation of a found recording as Zutrau sings of carving out independence in a failing relationship. On “Turn the Lights Down Low,” she uses a delicate falsetto to describe fears of being alone and the power to be gained by acknowledging them: “Maybe I could be tall/Maybe I could go gently/For the rest of this road/I’ll ride half empty.” Here, the bare-bones production and gentle melodies suits Zutrau’s writing, a synthesis the EP fails to sustain.
Pink Room falters with repetitiveness. Across the project, the guitars employ the same sleepy strumming patterns and Zutrau recycles cadences and images. “Tell Me Why” and “There’s a Light” open with nearly identical chords; the slight deviations in texture and tone read as variants of the same idea. What really prevents the EP from hitting the heights that “Larabar” promised, though, is the pedantic arrangements. These songs rarely surprise or enliven, seldom reaching a climax or expanding upon their initial concept. When Zutrau says that she wants to “stand up tall, but I am laying down empty as a hall,” you can almost feel her trying to break free of the project’s self-imposed constraints, only to hit her head on the ceiling.
