Cherry Soda Goes Flat
Hot off the heels of their 2025 record, the San Diego-based pop-punk group Wavves is back again with their tenth studio album, Cherry Soda. The former shitgaze pioneers keep their fuzzy pop sound, but package the ensemble up into a more commercial sound than their older music. The album follows the traditional Wavves structure, being an in-and-out 33 minutes without a single song too far over the three and a half minute mark. Two of the album’s ten tracks are minute-long synthesizer interludes. The rest of the record is the ensemble’s guitar-based music they’ve established over their long career.
The album was originally conceived as a collaboration album between the band and Say Anything singer Max Bemis, but following allegations of sexual misconduct directed at Bemis, the band decided to split ways and re-record the album without Bemis’s parts. Somehow, this process managed to only take two months from delay to release, which does call into question
How much they truly removed Bemis from the record; it’s impossible to assume that the band didn’t completely re-write and re-record every single song on the album, but it would be assumed that Bemis was involved in the writing of these songs. Likely the band just sang his parts, and he’ll keep his writing credit.
Musically, the record is pretty ordinary as far as pop punk goes. The songs are just a slew of power chords with maybe the occasional borrowed chord. The Say Anything influence feels pretty obvious here; the type of guitar playing you can hear on “Belt” or “Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too” feels on display here, although I question the band’s ability to write a riff quite as well as Say Anything in their prime.
Lyrically, the album isn’t much different. The opening track “I Get Around” features a pretty plain-jane set of angsty teenager lyrics, which feel embarrassing coming from the singer’s 40-year-old lead singer. He sings about how he’s “sick of sex, the smell of your breath,” culminating in a chorus of unrelenting “I get around, you get around” without the slightest amount of charm.
None of the songs are much better. “Pinesol” iconizes the cleaning product, cleaning an apartment up after a break-up. “We’re Still Alive” sings about how the singer is average, but “still alive”. There’s not a single complex metaphor on this record, and nary a bridge to be found. It feels as though the band wrote a verse, a chorus, a second verse, repeat ten times and called the album a delay. Suddenly the two-month delay feels like a more sensible length; it only took that short an amount of time to retool because there was hardly any substance in the first place.
This album will probably resonate with a pretty finite audience of indie teenagers with underdeveloped music tastes and washed-out millennials celebrating a favorite band long past their prime. Any theoretically positive elements present on this record can be found plentifully in other music.
