On the 1st December, UK punks Witching Waves (Emma Wigham and Mark Jasper) return with Streams and Waterways. It’s their fourth record and second on Specialist Subject Records, following 2019’s Persistence (which we lauded for its “ferocious energy and an uncompromising post-punk aesthetic”). Created during a period of significant upheaval—a short-lived move to rural Yorkshire and the birth of their first daughter—the record refines the duo’s signature hooky post-punk to focus on themes of loss, fresh starts and the futility of trying to swim against the current of the ephemerality we call life. As Jasper puts it: “Streams and Waterways is about the struggle of looking at the clock, realising it’s actually going pretty damn fast and knowing that really you have no control over anything.”
Lead single ‘Vessel’ is the perfect introduction to these ideas. Razor sharp and noisy as the genre’s finest, Jasper’s guitar arrives in an anxious tumult, along with the similarly uneasy opening line, “When I lie awake at night, blood running.” But the arrival of Wigham’s percussion adds a sense of forward motion, of purpose, and with it a steely sense of determination to stride into the future no matter what.
“We wrote ‘Vessel’ before Emma was pregnant,” Jasper describes of the track. “I remember it was the hottest day of the year and we were trying so hard to write something. We’d already written two or three songs that weekend, they were duds and we knew it. Last thing on the Sunday, Emma sang the beginning lines, and we wrote the whole thing, and ditched the other songs. It’s a bit eerie looking back, the song is about identity and nothing could have changed more in the months that followed.” Such origins are apparent in the sound itself, the immediacy possessing the momentum of a river suddenly undammed, flowing forth with the force of a gathered weight.