Here's an unexpected combination! Say Anything and Wavves both came along in the '00s, and they had extremely different takes on pop-punk. Say Anything had a troubled run in the Warped Tour spotlight before Wavves emerged as a scrappy, noisy lo-fi auteur. But now, all these years later, idiosyncratic frontmen Max Bemis and Nathan Williams have come together for a collaborative album.
The upcoming LP Cherry Soda follows Wavves' 2025 comeback album Spun and Say Anything's ...Is Sleazy, an unlistenable collection of indie covers. Bemis and Williams wrote a bunch of songs together, and they recorded them with Blink-182 collaborator Aaron Rubin. In a press release, Williams explains how the album came to be:
[Bemis] was Wavves-adjacent. He’d been on tour with our drummer (Ross Traver) and our friend Justice Tripp (Angel Du$t). I’m a very curious person creatively, and somehow Max told me he was a fan. After really digging into his catalog, I was kind of in shock. His records are really interesting. I wanted to see what an early 2000s Wavves emo record would sound like. That was the idea. To make a mall emo record.
Bemis says:
We kind of wrote to each other's situations. We're both very different people, but we get along really well. As writers, we pushed ourselves. He became more emo, and I became more Wavves-y. I think we brought out some of the stuff that isn't most obvious in each other. I may be singing stuff that sounds kind of bleak, but that's kind of like Nate's whole shtick, although he's actually a very sweet, sensitive guy.
Lead single "Deathx1k" is a soaring pop-punk anthem with a singalong chorus about running out of drugs and a claymation video from director Jelly Eyes. Below, check out the "Deathx1k" clip and the Cherry Soda tracklist.
TRACKLIST:
01 “Keep What Hurts”
02 “Deathx1k”
03 “Gone Away”
04 “So Low”
05 “Still Alive”
06 “Cherry Soda”
07 “Sell You Hope”
08 “Litterbug”
09 “Pretend Again”
10 “Pinesol”
Cherry Soda is out 9/18 on I Surrender Records. Pre-order it here.
