Brothers Nick and Teddy Panopoulos seemed to have a very different agenda when they launched their Dead Waves project nearly a decade ago with the psyched-out garage rock EP Take Me Away. But over the years, it feels like the raucous basement-show charm of that set up has been stripped away, leaving little behind on their latest project, the somberly titled Abandoned Children EP, besides minimized percussion and bass, spectral guitar drones, and pained, muted vocals swirling around the album’s seven haunted tracks.
But it isn’t just an instrumental eeriness that embodies the album—which ranges in sound from the early bedroom slowcore recordings of The Antlers to doom-metal mainstays Thou’s unplugged Inconsolable EP. Lyrically, the project hones in on a topic that’s unfortunately become particularly relevant in the US this week. “It’s about feeling empathy for all the abandoned children who feel hopeless in our present day reality,” the band’s Teddy Panopoulos shares. “Even if they aren’t abandoned physically, just being abandoned mentally in one way or another, through shitty parents, upbringings, depressing school systems, or a society that doesn’t really care about them, or questioning their true selves and feeling isolated and less than what they are.”
With the album officially dropping tomorrow via Entheon Records, you can catch an early stream below. You can also pre-order it here.
