By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring Dead Gowns’ utterly beautiful debut IT’S SUMMER, I LOVE YOU, AND I’M SURROUNDED BY SNOW and wakelee’s tightly wound emo EP DOGHOUSE!
Dead Gowns – IT’S SUMMER, I LOVE YOU, AND I’M SURROUNDED BY SNOW
Genre: Singer-Songwriter, Indie Rock
Favorite Tracks: “How Can I,” “Wet Dog,” “In The Haze,” “Swimmer,” “See People”
“I don’t think
I can afford the time to not sit right down &
write a poem about the heavy lidded
white rose I hold in my hand”
So goes the opening of Eileen Myles’ Shhh, the poem by which Genevieve Beaudoin found the title of her album, IT’S SUMMER, I LOVE YOU, AND I’M SURROUNDED BY SNOW. Dead Gowns’ debut is present and immediate, each line delivered with that same sense of overwhelmed urgency; Beaudoin can’t afford to not emotionally convey everything we’re about to hear—the gravity of her words is powerfully calculated on every song, perhaps the album’s most impressive feat given it was recorded over a nearly four-year span between 2020 and 2023 in “various bedrooms, desacralized churches, and old gymnasiums on or near islands in coastal Maine.” The opening line of IT’S SUMMER, I LOVE YOU, AND I’M SURROUNDED BY SNOW exists in somewhat hilarious opposition to Myles’ poem: “Every time I say I’ll do it in the morning / I’ll do it in the morning / the alarm goes off / and I don’t do it in the morning.” But Beaudoin’s gorgeous songwriting still feels spontaneous, every lyric treated like the heavy-lidded white rose and each musical passage conveyed as a thing of remarkable and considered beauty.
Plenty of debut albums are made in the trenches, but with Dead Gowns you can literally sense that it isn’t just a few years in the making, but a lifetime in the making. It recalls breakout records like Angel Olsen’s BURN YOUR FIRE FOR NO WITNESS or Cate Le Bon’s REWARD, where the rich production matches the contemplative writing, maximal big pop choruses, and chilling emotional breakdowns. Every detail therein—from the passion-fueled, rollicking guitars and irrepressible choruses of “In The Haze” to the quiet, yearning pedal steel ballad “See People”—explores the dazed longing and heartening listlessness of the human experience. Watching your mother watch her mother die, cleaning up the snow prints your boots left behind in the hallway, the smell of a peach… there is a visceral sense of place and time to Beaudoin’s writing. With her HOW EP, we saw flashes of the brilliance to come, notably the flashy rock hook of “Renter Not A Buyer,” and it’s great to see IT’S SUMMER, I LOVE YOU, AND I’M SURROUNDED BY SNOW make good and then some on Dead Gowns’ promise. We’re not far into 2025, but it’s an early AOTY candidate. You can snag it over on Bandcamp.
wakelee – DOGHOUSE
Genre: Emo, Pop Punk
Favorite Tracks: “mildlyinteresting,” “Rejoice,” “Gary’s Outcome”
A fun fact about wakelee is that vocalist Alex and drummer David are identical twins. That’s not the sexiest lede for the writeup of an excellent meat-and-potatoes emo EP, but consider for a moment how few musical acts have identical twins—off the dome, I can think of those bald guys in Brandi Carlile’s band, and members of the Cribs and the National. Good (I guess?) company to be in. Without saying anything of the music, I feel like this must make the record absolutely worth approximately 14 minutes of your time? Right?
No?
Fine. Let’s quickly talk about the music.
DOGHOUSE, their latest EP with non-twin bassist Elliot Shiang, is the brighter, more polished follow up to their 2023 self-titled debut. It’s a five-song affair that puts an emphasis on the breezy pop punk choruses that were the strength of that album, but with production that sounds both tighter and slicker. The songs each land with a punch more akin to established peers like world’s greatest dad or Retirement Party, but they continue to have the coolness of a band like oso oso—all artists who have largely leaned on fiercely earnest but clever lyrics and tried-and-true radio-focused singles to dodge any broader modern emo trends. There are a few blustery Midwest’ish ballads here, notably both the title track and “Bangkok,” but even the latter slowly grows into a driving, soft alt-rock song that, in a different time, would more resemble failed big-budget projects like the Lonely Forest or Company of Thieves than whatever modern emo is. The highlights, though, are each big, undeniable rock songs; opener “mildlyinteresting” is a kinetic screamalong, with shattered vocals about online isolation, while “Gary’s Outcome” angrily contemplates death with a buzzsaw refrain and a loudly growing sincerity. The twin thing should have sold you, but if it didn’t, hopefully some of 2025’s best emo to date will. You can listen over on Bandcamp.
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