It’s been a couple of years since the release of Wax Idols‘ critically applauded 2013 release, Discipline + Desire, and over the course of the past two years, the quartet’s frontperson and primary songwriter Hether Fortune spent some time as a touring member of White Lung and went through a heartbreaking divorce, which informs a great deal of the material on the band’s forthcoming full-length.
As Fortune explains in press notes, “this is not an entirely sad album. The whole spectrum of grief is represented here — shock, pain, anger, loneliness, and then finding a way to work through all of that and not only survive, and thrive. That’’s what I was going through. I was kind of trying to save myself.”” Fortune goes on to explain that with the new effort “the arrangements are deliberately more minimal so that the songs themselves can really shine.”
Interestingly, Fortune initially wrote and recorded every single note on the album and in many ways it gives the entire album and its first single “Lonely You” a deeply personal vision and point of view, in which the heartache at the core of “Lonely You” is palpable. Here is a song in which the song’s narrator is haunted by the ghosts of a relationship that has just ended — and there’s a weird push and pull between desperately wanting that person back, not quite knowing how you’ll move on and desperately wanting to move forward, sometimes simultaneously.
Sonically speaking, the song sounds as though it draws heavily from 80s New Wave — in particular, Concrete Blonde, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Too True-era Dum Dum Girls and others, as the song is comprised of shimmering guitar chords, four-on-the-floor drumming and Fortune’s dusky, seductive croon.
