Wavves

Wavves crashed into indie rock prominence when the 2010 album King of the Beach fused grunge guitars, punk attitude, and slacker bubblegum, lifting Nathan Williams’ project to the forefront of the blog-rock pack. Earlier releases existed, yet those confusingly self-titled albums never aligned as cohesively until this point. Subsequent years traced an uneven course that included further albums, a brief major-label stint for the slick Afraid of Heights in 2009, an abrupt departure from that label, and an evolution into a dependable modern grunge-punk outfit willing to experiment, whether through the sample-heavy 2018 set You’re Welcome or the restrained balladry of the 2021 Dave Sitek-produced Hideaway.

San Diego native Williams launched the project at 21 after resigning from his Music Trader clerk position, splitting spare hours between skateboarding, his hip-hop blog Ghost Ramp, and home recordings made on an ’80s Tascam cassette recorder alongside GarageBand software. Inexperience with the program turned a month of bedroom sessions into two complete albums whose tracks were heavily distorted by overloaded inputs. Rather than discarding the results, Williams embraced the overloaded sound and began circulating the material online, where Wavves quickly gained attention from Internet critics and fellow bloggers who hailed it as “the next big thing.”

Reviewers highlighted the work’s immediacy and D.I.Y. spirit, prompting Williams to lean further into those qualities by repeatedly posting free digital versions of new material—two 7" singles, a cassette, and an EP—each wrapped in his own hand-drawn artwork or scanned photographs. Around the same period the first LP, simply titled Wavves, appeared in a limited Woodsist edition. The even more confusingly titled Wavvves (note the third “V”) was next slated for De Stijl before Williams switched to Fat Possum; after the track listing changed, the release date shifted by a month and the album finally surfaced on March 17, 2009. Strong notices dominated April, yet late May brought negative coverage when Williams, aided onstage by drummer Ryan Ulsh, suffered a minor meltdown and left the Primavera Sound Festival stage. He later apologized, attributing the episode to poor choices and a combination of ecstasy, Valium, and Xanax.

Following a handful of tracks cut with drummer Zach Hill, Williams entered the studio in 2010 with Grammy-winning producer Dennis Herring for a direct and unexpectedly refined album. After King of the Beach arrived in August, Wavves toured as a trio completed by bassist Stephen Pope and drummer Billy Hayes, both formerly of Jay Reatard’s band. Once the Fat Possum association ended, Williams issued the 2011 EP Life Sux under the Wavves name, featuring guest spots from Best Coast and Fucked Up. He and Pope then self-funded sessions for a new album with producer John Hill, whose credits include Rihanna and Santigold. Mom + Pop signed the band and released the slickly produced, very ’90s-influenced Afraid of Heights in early spring of 2013. Williams subsequently turned to the beat-driven Sweet Valley project begun with his brother Joel in 2012, issuing their SV album in July 2013. Still restless, he formed Spirit Club in 2014 with Joel and Andrew Caddick, also known as Jeans Wilder.

His appetite for collaboration showed no sign of slowing when he joined Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings to record No Life for Me in 2014; Ghost Ramp issued the album just before Wavves’ fifth full-length. The stripped-down, hook-laden V marked their Warner Bros. debut, though the experience proved difficult, as a flurry of angry tweets before the September 2015 release underscored. Post-release touring included dates alongside Cherry Glazerr and Best Coast. The Warner Bros. period proved short-lived; the next album appeared on Ghost Ramp, where the sample-heavy, super-poppy You’re Welcome was recorded primarily by Williams alone before Pope, guitarist Alex Gates, and drummer Brian Hill contributed their parts separately. After the supporting tour cycle concluded in December 2018, Hill exited the group.

Williams returned to San Diego and resumed writing in the shed behind his parents’ house, the same space that had hosted some of Wavves’ earliest material. He brought the new songs to Pope and Gates, yet initial studio attempts faltered until the band enlisted TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek to steer production. The revised sessions succeeded, yielding mid-2021’s Hideaway, which balances the group’s pop playfulness with its grungy slacker atmosphere and was issued once more by Fat Possum, the label behind the band’s breakthrough releases a decade earlier.