Wallows - Model Review

The third studio album from indie pop-rock sensations has a few stand-out singles, but overall offers a plain, stale and uninspired addition to the genre.

Recently, Wallows front-man and famous actor Dylan Minnette went viral for comments regarding his stalling acting career. Why was his screen time disappearing? Well, “acting started to feel like a job,” he’d remarked. For a, well, actor, this might be a somewhat ludicrous proclamation, but the point Dylan was trying to make was this: his true love is his indie pop band, Wallows. They have some crackers up their sleeve, that’s for sure: think ‘Are you bored yet?’ Featuring Clairo, climbing steadily to almost one billion Spotify streams. At this point, it’s safe to say that three-piece Wallows are finally famous outside of the link to hit teen series 13 Reasons Why Minnette is best known for.

Was Dylan right to hang up his full-time “job” and place all his bets on this indie-summer album? Ultimately, the answer is no. Whilst the album isn’t necessarily awful, it’s dry and plain. It adds nothing to the stacks and stacks of indie guitar music with twinkling synths and mopey lyrics readily available wherever you stream your music. It’s a deck full of alternative songs sung by gorgeous cis men – appealing for background music, that is. 

First single ‘Your Apartment’ cemented their new journey off solidly, if a little uninspired, with the stately synth and guitar rigidly professing their consistency around lyrics that aptly render something askew. ‘Anytime, Always’ meanders through predictable keys and sometimes, oddly, remains on them until the bloated track needs a clap track to save it. 

First introduction to the album didn’t seem this dire; Wallows cherry-picked their best songs as singles and milked their stirring technicolour melodies too early until they, too, became monochrome. Album highlight ‘You (Show Me Where My Days Went)’ is a surprising, balanced and ambitious song of new love and yearning. ‘A Warning’ makes up for its terribly slow pre-chorus with a head-bobbing thump behind it.

‘Calling After Me’ is the most popular of the singles and is an early standout - it’s sticky in the way a pastry for dessert might be. But dig a little deeper and the wheels begin to unravel; it uses the same guitar guitar chord progression, the drum-track is uninspired. Dylan’s voice uses the standard, American high-school ‘woahs’ in the way we always hear them. It’s Wallows, but it’s also unimaginative. The bridge builds up as another iteration of the chorus with volume and body increased, expansion and innovation replaced by simple doubling. It’s all a little. Flat. Done before. 

Of course, Dylan isn’t the only band member; Braeden Lemasters voice is a welcome addition to ‘Bad Dream’, which begins to feel like a remake of their old hit ‘1980s Horror Film’. “Are you having a bad dream baby? I wanna wake you but you won’t let me,” he sings. The lyricism shows no attempt to get to the root of the stories puckered like a kiss at surface level. Cole Preston’s drumming is heavy on the hi-hat but overall inoffensive - though it’s particularly good in the curious whistling tune ‘I Wouldn’t Mind’. 

Wallows’ track record is a little wobbly when it comes to album endings; 2022 album ‘Tell Me That It’s Over’ finishes with a whimper, whilst 2019 ‘Nothing Happens’ closing epic ‘Do Not Wait’’ finishes dramatically and atmospherically, not far from the mercurial late-night-drive feel of Harry Styles’ ‘Fine Line’. Here Wallows miss the mark again with the albums’ close, which takes an early stumble with the weirdly murmured track ‘Canada’. There’s some promising polyrhythms in ‘Don’t You Think It’s Strange?’ but Wallows again linger on ideas too long. It’s like they’ve made the album in a box - straight lines make good sketches, but without recognition that things must curve, bend, compress and expand, we’re still surrounded by the one-track symptoms of a muffled imagination. When we get to the closing track ‘Only Ecstasy’, the Wallows sound has unravelled. It’s a painfully bad song.

Ultimately, the handful of stand-out indie-pop singles on ‘Model’ are not enough to make any sort of mark on the genre. The effort is appreciated, and I still might return to the band for their older songs, wrapped smugly in the protection of memory. I won’t be the first to say that the music industry, oversaturated as it is, has no time for this. It’s an old remark, but here quite apt; don’t give up your day job, Dylan.