Day Wave

Day Wave (the project of singer/instrumentalist Jackson Phillips) returns with his upcoming album, Pastlife, out June 24, 2022 via [PIAS] Recordings. The first new full-length record from Day Wave in five years, Pastlife meanders through different dreamscapes of breezy, oceanside indie rock, plucky, minimalist bedroom pop, and tidal waves of cosmic emo and stratospheric shoegaze. It feels like walking through a room of artifacts from previous stages of your life, now sun-bleached and peeling at the edges, but still as intoxicating and powerful as ever. Pastlife isn’t saddened, though; it’s full of hope and energy.

For Jackson, as for most others stuck at home, the pandemic has been a time of “ceaseless looking backward,” trying to find his footing as a musician years removed from the moving and shaking of touring and creating life. “With this record, it just feels like I’m stepping into this thing from my past,” says Phillips. “I started Day Wave when I was 25, and now I’m 32. I guess I didn’t really realize how much was going to change in that time.”

Some of those changes are routine, like the splintering off of friends into their careers and personal relationships. For Phillips, still a working musician, that meant a degree of alienation. But the deeper thread is the existential alienation created by the simple passage of time. “I kinda thought that being 25 was just gonna stay like that forever, and then it didn’t,” he says.

Pastlife wades through these complexities. “I think back to the times where you didn’t realize you were living in this exciting time,” continues Phillips. “At this point, there’s enough of those different chapters that I think back on them, like ‘Oh, when I lived in that apartment, when I was hanging out with those people,’ whatever it is. That became the whole vibe of the album: everyone around me is growing up, and I’m trying to figure out my own way of doing that I guess.”

Phillips wrote the songs for Pastlife between the end of 2020 and the first six months of 2021, and four of the tracks were written while streaming on Twitch, a new method he tried to stay connected with people. Phillips would screenshare Logic with a minimized cam feed of him in the corner of the screen, so viewers could see everything he was doing as he played, sang, and produced. He’d stream for up to three hours, and leave the session with a new demo.

The central acknowledgment of Pastlife: however desirous we are for the past, that feeling is matched in intensity by the impossibility of returning to it. What do we do with that conflict? If you’re Jackson Phillips, you go back to your past life—Day Wave—and make something new with it.