Waves Crashing put out a 30-minute shoegaze record overnight — In the Blur is already the pick of the day

Shoegaze runs on a specific contradiction: guitars built to dissolve while the song insists on being heard. Waves Crashing live in that space. On In the Blur, their second album, the Olympia, Washington trio makes it feel less like genre exercise and more like weather — the kind that soaks you before you notice it started raining.

Joshua Calisti (guitar, vocals, cello, lyrics), Bryce Albright (drums), and Zach Olson (bass, backing vocals) have been working the Pacific Northwest circuit since their debut EP in 2021. 1 That's a scene with real lineage — they've shared stages with Ringo Deathstarr, The Veldt, and Wavves, bands whose relationship to noise and melody broadly maps onto where Waves Crashing sit. 2

Their 2025 debut Effection wasn't a small start. KEXP, Obscure Sound, and the Seattle Times each named it among their year-end best-of lists. 2 That kind of regional credibility takes years to build and matters more than streaming numbers when you're working at this level of the underground.

Eight tracks in roughly 30 minutes: lean, no filler. 3 The tracklist runs Feel The Glow, Circles, Marine Garden, Divide, Out & Away, Coming Up For Air, Creep (a Radiohead cover), and Next To Me. That sequencing matters — you get through six originals before the cover appears, by which point the band has established enough of its own voice that the cover doesn't function as a crutch.

Reviewer Alice Teeple at Post-Punk.com filed a full write-up the same day the record dropped, which is a reasonable signal that someone with ears in this space took it seriously. Her take on the sonic lineage is specific and useful: Pixies tension, Lemonheads directness, Eels bruised humor, and Jesus and Mary Chain's devotion to guitar effects. 2 Those aren't random references — each one names a different axis of the sound. You can hear the record as a negotiation between all four of them.

Teeple's phrase for the album's overall shape: she describes it as "a private weather forecast — anxious, bruised, romantic, and often generous." 2 On the Radiohead cover, she writes that it "allows it to drift, loosen, and become strange again" 2 — which is roughly the highest possible bar for a Creep cover given how thoroughly that song has been bled dry over three decades.

On r/shoegaze, a listener who backed their first album's fundraiser posted the same day to say the second album is "even better" — calling out the drum mix specifically and noting it as "the type of shoegaze where you mostly can make out what the vocals are saying," which in that community is its own category of compliment. 4 His standout cut: Marine Garden.

The record is 24 hours old. Teeple's review is on the board. The subreddit is talking. None of this has had time to calcify into received opinion — which means you still get to form your own.

The physical edition is 200 copies of translucent blue vinyl at $27, shipping around June 1. 3 A CD at $10 and a digital download at $8 round out the options. Waves Crashing also have a record-store release show booked for June 27. 1

Teeple's summary of what they're doing: "Waves Crashing aren't here to reinvent the wheel; they're here to let it roll fast, skip a curb, and spray you with whatever's left in the puddle." 2 It's a critic's line, but it describes the experience accurately: kinetic, imprecise, and hard to shake.