Spiral XP never wanted to be another band lumped into the same scene as the rest of shoegaze’s new wave. “We just try to worry about having good songs and remove ourselves from any larger discourse or whatever the noise might be called,” frontman Max Keyes told these pages in an interview on the heels of releasing last year’s promising breakthrough EP, It’s Been A While. He also hinted that their debut full-length would be more collaborative and take the opportunity to explore more unconventional sounds. We’re here over a year later with that album coming to fruition on I Wish I Was a Rat, and it’s hard to argue with the guy that his creative prophecy hasn’t been fulfilled. Still, it’s difficult not to acknowledge how the album is one of the better examples of sonic shapes bent and reverberating from that new ‘gaze aesthetic in a banner year for bands of that ilk whether the Seattle rockers want to admit it or not. They’re just too good at crafting distortion, noise and pop resonant through their full-length vehicle, start to finish no skips cohesively in the most earnest artist sense.

Give a big hand to Keyes amplifying the five-piece’s collaborative energy when it counts the most — the mark of a leader who knows that their strength in songwriting is only as good as the many hands and brains who help bring it to life. In giving bassist Lena Farr-Morrissey substantial shine on from the vocal heavens to offset his own bummer vibes getting buried under the dread of capitalism, Spiral XP — alongside guitarists Jordan Mang and Kyle McCollum, and drummer Daniel Byington — sound wholly of a electric body in a static-diffused prism of colorful moods and textures where hook-perfect guitar-pop, the grungy indie rock inspo of their PNW surroundings, the cool slack of trip-hop, and a refraction of feedback-drenched riffs ebb the listen in and out of conscious and subconscious states, seeking something real out of a world that’s becoming less honest by the minute. They’re proving existential overcast and partly sunny skies can coexist within the same woozy atmosphere, and it all pops even harder when you’re focusing on just doing you.

Highlights: “Horse Money”, “Cruel World”, “Awake”

Spiral XP’s I Wish I Was a Rat is available now on Danger Collective Records.

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