Phil Galloni is a Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, studio engineer and producer, who has been running Voltiv Sound since 2015. His solo recording project Waverly Drive can be traced to when he turned some downtime in the studio to the project’s debut EP, last year’s Living in a Fantasy, which saw him crafting material that drew from indie rock, New Wave, indie pop and electro pop — and is perfect for driving up the coast, daydreaming and just escaping life’s absurdities.
As a solo artist his work has been covered in a number of publications including The Line of Best Fit, The 405, Clash Magazine, Post-Punk.com, Good Music Radar, Havoc Underground, We Write About Music and more.
Building upon a growing profile, Gallini’s sophomore Waverly Drive EP Now I Know is slated for release Friday. While Living in a Fantasy was a carefree and uptempo batch of songs, Now I Know is a matured, mid tempo follow-up that thematically questions everyday reality through the lens of escapism and surrealism and touches upon themes of love, trust, loss, class systems and more. Several studio musicians contributed to the EP including Magic Wands‘ Chris Valentine, Miguel‘s, Mayer Hawthorne‘s and Grace VanderWaal’s Melissa Dougherty, Dropkick Murphy‘s and Stu Hamm‘s Halley Feaster, Chebaka’s and Allá’s Christiaan Dageforde, Stefan Ponce‘s and KO AKA Koala‘s Jess Hoover, Macy Gray‘s and Family Company‘s Alex Kynh, French Montana‘s and The Weeknd‘s Russ Mitkowski and Cameron Ljungkull.
The EP’s latest single “Mind Play” is decidedly 80s New Wave/synth pop song built around gentle layers of glistening synths, skittering beats, Galloni’s yearning vocal paired with the Chicago-born, Los Angeles producer and artist’s penchant for remarkably catchy hooks. Sonically, “Mind Play” manages to bring Human League’s “Human” and New Order to mind while being rooted in seemingly lived-in personal experience.
Galloni explains that “This song is about how much better things could be in life and love if we stopped playing games with each other.”
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