No one sets out to be a one-hit wonder. But when a band has an absolute runaway success early in their career — a song that single-handedly catapults them into the public purview — it has the potential to become something of an indelible subscript to their name. Think of how difficult it is to extricate early Radiohead from the looming shadow of “Creep,” or The Killers from “Mr. Brightside.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that these songs are indicative of the band’s best work, but rather, their defining work in the public consciousness. I would argue that while most people could very easily recognize the opening riff of “Seven Nation Army,” they’d have a tough time naming both members of The White Stripes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a relatively successful band that hasn’t experienced such a phenomenon, and Wallows is no exception.
In 2019, “Are You Bored Yet?,” the band’s soft, synth-based collaboration with Clairo, propelled Wallows into newfound popularity, finding its way into nearly every lo-fi Spotify playlist in existence. Even if you think you’ve never listened to Wallows, you probably have without realizing it out of the sheer digital omnipresence of that song alone. Featured as the lead single on their similarly well-received debut album Nothing Happens, “Are You Bored Yet?” has found its permanent resting place at the top of their Spotify artist page.
But when everyone says that you’ve knocked it out of the park on your debut effort, how do you spend the rest of your career chasing that ideal precedent you’ve set for yourself? On their third album, Model, Wallows is well aware of the expectations, and they’ve delivered a thoughtful, well-crafted set of songs to further flush out their considerable catalog, even if that doesn’t necessarily translate to chart-topping hits.
In the five years since Nothing Happens, Wallows has certainly evolved in sound. At first, they were misconstrued as bedroom pop via their association with Clairo, and then as the circumstantially electronic sound of their aptly-titled Remote EP, recorded over the pandemic. But Wallows has always been an indie rock band at its core, with a clear lineage of energetic guitars, catchy hooks and tight two-to-three-minute numbers that can be traced back to the likes of The Strokes (the same of which could be said for every male indie rock band since 2004).
Although that 2000s alt-rock sound is most heavily apparent in their early work, traces of its influence still slip into Model. As soon as I heard the opening chords of “Anytime, Always” and hit single “Calling After Me,” I couldn’t shake the thought that they could unobtrusively slot into place on The Strokes’ Room on Fire tracklist. There’s such an easygoing confidence to the latter that immediately draws you in — the melodic guitar intro, the comfortably well-worn vocals humming along, the slickly refined production and the allure of a secret relationship in the cheeky delivery of “Don’t play dumb, I know you fantasize / You could have me on my back every night.”
Most of the lyrics on the album veer towards the confessional, with a diaristic structure that continuously builds into each song’s apex. The entirety of “Canada” unspools like one long uninterrupted secret, sung in hushed tones with intimate verses murmured right into your ears. On “Your Apartment,” each verse forcibly establishes a boundary with an ex (“Let’s think before we go and hit send / You’re crying to me on the phone again”), only for the chorus to unearth the truth in a hard and fast shout: “Who said I don’t understand or that I probably won’t remember time in the palm of your hand … I promise, I get your sentiment / I wonder who’s been at your apartment.” It’s a painful admission of reciprocal jealousy and lingering attachment that has been ripped out in a burst of feeling, like an exposed nerve ending that’s still raw and vulnerable to the touch.
Then there are the songs that exist in the classic Wallows sweet spot — ones that sound unmistakably like summer (“Quarterback,” “Remember When”), with a steady uptempo beat and innocuously catchy little hooks slipped into every other line. “A Warning” opens with playful little chimes and a key riff that feels like drops splattering on the surface of a sun-soaked pool, their vocals reverberating gently over your skin. The ease of the sonic landscape exists in sharp contrast to the subject at hand — looking back on a relationship that has completely deteriorated, searching the picture-perfect surface for warning signs that were never really there.
“You (Show Me Where My Days Went)” also delves into a soft pop sound with catchy hooks (I’ve had “you-OOoo-OOoo” stuck in my head for days), luring you in with the ease of a crush at first glance. The lyrics tell a narrative of someone lost and purposeless until they took one look at the right person and everything fell into place: “When you came along, I knew what was wrong / If you want to know exactly what I I’ve missed / It’s you.” The rhetoric of rekindled relationships and love at first sight is one we’ve been fed by pop radio incessantly, yet there’s an interesting undertone to this song as Wallows carves out a caveat to that ideal. On the surface, you convince yourself that this relationship was what you were missing all this time, but what does it mean to use the perfect partner to assign meaning to one’s life? Were the endless days of searching that came before it “all wasted nights” just because your other half wasn’t there?
That’s the core message of Model — questioning the ideas of love, fame and success that you’ve built up in your head over a lifetime, that model of perfection and expectation that you’ve spent so long chasing after. Once you reach that impossible height, how could you possibly reconcile that ideal with reality?
“Don’t You Think It’s Strange” follows a similarly anxious path of questioning, asking why we “Always look for someone you relate to / Always look for someone who can change you?” The lyrics may poke holes in the narrative of a traditional love song, but they’re stitched together with the band’s familiar sound of catchy choruses and steady melodic rhythms, demonstrating that dichotomy between the surface-level appearance of perfection (everything sounds right, like classic Wallows) and lyrics zeroed in on the messy underbelly of a relationship, directly interrogating that ideal of love and the dream partner.
“She’s An Actress,” an innocuous slow-tempo track in the back end of the album, boasts one of the band’s strongest lyrical efforts. Continuously winding from the false affections and unfounded connections afforded by fame, the lyrics are unabashedly raw and personal; the narrator nervously wonders whether they’ll always feel so empty and alone, perpetually worried that the next person they’ll meet is just “Two more blank eyes looking through me / Thinking of a place from where you maybe knew me.” By the end, even the illusion of the dream girl herself is punctured, as doubt creeps in and she becomes little more than “A wonder, a sensation … like a figment of my imagination.”
In terms of sonic and thematic cohesion, not every song on the album hits the mark. “I Wouldn’t Mind” ventures into an odd ’90s whistle backtrack, and the more sparkly touches on “Going Under” and “Bad Dream” have echoes of a jangly, Tame Impala-esque glow. “Only Ecstasy” is a bit of a strange closer; it is so uncharacteristically earnest and sappy that it almost teeters over into disingenuousness. I can’t fully take the line “You are my only ecstasy / You are the only one for me” seriously. For a band that once ordered their tracks so seamlessly that each song transitioned into the next, it feels weird to experience a Wallows album that is somewhat disjointed. But maybe that’s the point: To let the imperfections lie and realize that they were never going to write another Nothing Happens, and that’s okay too.
My mind keeps drifting back to the album cover of Model, the grainy interior shot of a house, the golden glow of the picturesque sunset in the window frame. It’s like the manifestation of the line that practically catapulted them to fame: “We could stay at home or watch the sunset / But I can’t help from asking / Are you bored yet?” With Model, Wallows has made it clear that they are nowhere near bored of their own sound or potential yet, and neither should you be.
Daily Arts Writer Serena Irani can be reached at seirani@umich.edu.
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