Oakland, California’s Wax Idols have been carving out the niche of dark ’80s and post-punk with surprisingly warm melodies for several albums now, and managed a long enough gap between their previous effort, 2015’s American Tragic, and now to build up anticipation to what the project was working on. Well, the wait is over, as Wax Idols will release their latest album, Happy Ending, on May 16th via the band’s label Etruscan Gold Records.
In advance of the effort, the group has shared “Scream,” which hits on everything the band has done well in the past, but in a magnified and expanded form, to the extent that the song feels confidently familiar right out of the gate. It’s a lead track that warrants the wait, and certainly builds excitement for what’s to come.
Bandleader Heather Fortune spoke to NPR about the song:
“Finding inspiration in one of my favorite poems, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas, I used this song as a vehicle to meditate on the concept of free will & how one could choose to exercise it even at the brink of death…. The protagonist is someone who is young, madly in love & desperately wants to live — though they know that they will not. They have chosen to use their final seconds, the only breath in their lungs, to scream out the name of the one that they love.”
Check out Wax Idols’ “Scream” above.
