CARWASH SOUNDTRACKS ADOLESCENCE AND PANDEMONIUM WITH DEBUT EP SOAP WATER OUT NOW, LISTEN TO ‘FRIENDSHIP’

20-year-old multi-instrumentalist and multi-disciplinary artist Garrett Seamans today shares soap water, the debut EP from his latest emo-tinged DIY pop project, carwash. LISTEN HERE.

Bringing together previous singles ‘boyfriend, girlfriend‘ and ‘racetrack‘, soap water chronicles the transformation of close friendship into young love, evocatively capturing the fluctuating emotions of hesitant, demure uncertainty, and passionate surety that contour this chrysalis. On opener ‘friendship‘ and lead single ‘racetrack‘, his ardour expresses itself through emotive bursts of crunched-out, reverb-laden electric guitars, and flurries of wistful, nostalgic melodies, channeling the pangs and pulls of adolescent desire, combining coastal haziness with the yearning of second-wave emo and the arena-sized relatability of contemporary bedroom pop in sweeping, lovelorn pushes. At the center lies second single ‘racetrack‘, Seamans‘ half-murmured, multitrack vocals, lingering, atmospheric instrumentation and strummed, raw-mic’d acoustic guitar painting unhurried, unspoken intimacy in lo-fi tones reminiscent of Alex G and Florist. And elsewhere, as on ‘a big tree in a giant green field‘ and closer ‘at least i lived it with you‘, carwash fashions delicate, fleeting vignettes of emotion where ghostly samples – snippets of field recordings and voice memos – float in and out of the mix and languid, plucked guitars impart the vulnerability of stripping yourself completely bare.

soap water was born during the seemingly endless, listless hours of lockdown-induced monotony: a cycle of wake, record, aimlessly plod around the neighbourhood, record some more, and repeat that produced a cache of demos originally intended for Seamans‘ ears only, for his own amusement and sanity as he whiled away the hours. The five tracks collected on soap water give a soundtrack to these two peculiar periods of life – the pandemic and adolescence; each of them ache acutely with the missing presence of human connection and yearn nostalgically for simpler times, looking to both the past and the future, as Seamans imparts stories of navigating life via friendship and his lyricism bristles with the uncertainty of an ambiguous future.