Clandestinely filling the air around us with a fragility that will only grow more pristine and harmonious in the minutes soon to follow, Phantom Wave’s “Anterograde” is the perfect way for the act to kick their debut album Wilds into gear. From here, the heaviness of “Resin” nor the spindly quality in “Amarinthine” will not translate as being particularly experimental or alternative in nature; one song will build on the frame of the one to have just come before it in the tracklist, with the band reaching a climax in the final tune here as powerful as any novel’s conclusion. It’s progressive and enticing, but hardly the only reason why I would tell you to get ahold of this LP as soon as humanly possible right now.

BANDCAMP: https://phantomwaveband.bandcamp.com/track/anterograde

“Billows” continues a theme of duality as the grooves get more intense in Wilds, but by no means does it fall into monotony from an aesthetical perspective; nothing here ever has the chance to do that. “High Dive” and “Recursive” slip back and forth between ambient pop and modern neo-psychedelia, with the aesthetical bonds tying their experimental edging together never becoming the central focus over the lyrics for a second. The personality in this material is always a greater draw than the compositional excess is, and once you’ve had a chance to take in a lot of the headier moments in the album, I think you’re going to appreciate this statement for the irony it presents. Phantom Wave are, in more ways than one, breaking the mold with their debut LP’s release.

The stretch here from “Everglades” to “Depth Charge,” which includes a pair of songs in “Glower” and “Valhalla,” could have made for a fine extended play indeed, but the fact that this somewhat brooding collection of tracks is only one portion of Wilds is perhaps telling of how much ambitiousness really exists in this band right now. They had every ability to make something simpler with this record, something that wouldn’t have shaken up the grander scheme of things nearly as much as this did, but they still were determined to go with the more elaborate and affective of the two routes set before them. This choice is making their adventure even more exciting to follow, not to mention easier for a picky critic like myself to cover.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Anterograde/dp/B087LQX82Z

Wilds comes to a conclusion with the brilliantly retro “Across the Avenues” and gentle bruiser “Sweet Cheera,” which carries us into the silence with a psychedelic strand of melodicism I could get lost in all day long, and when everything is over, it’s tempting to go back through the album and reexamine some of the more complicated moments included here. Phantom Wave are a band that didn’t exist on my radar just a couple of weeks ago, but now, they’ve quickly become one of my go-to resources for potent alternative rock this spring, and it’s entirely because of the effort they put into their debut LP. A five-star event from beginning to end, Wilds is everything alternative rock needs to be contemporarily.

John McCall