King of the Beach

There's a specific kind of haze that settles over this track before the first verse even arrives — fuzz-drenched guitars that should be aggressive but somehow come out sounding like sunscreen and warm asphalt, the noise worn down to something almost ambient by Nathan Williams' laid-back production instincts. Wavves sit at an interesting intersection: they're too loud and distorted to be beach pop, too melodic and sun-drunk to be noise rock, and "King of the Beach" lives entirely in that unresolved middle space. Williams' voice is nasal and half-committed in a way that sounds like performance at first but reveals itself as genuine — he really does seem to be delivering these lines from a horizontal position. The melody is infectious in the way that songs about self-defeating behavior often are, a kind of anthemic quality given to the act of not trying. The lyrics construct a persona who claims dominion while clearly adrift, a self-appointed king of exactly nowhere, and the song's great joke is that it sounds triumphant anyway. It belongs to the blog-era lo-fi revival of around 2010, when bedroom recording aesthetics became a deliberate aesthetic statement. Reach for this one when the afternoon has dissolved into nothing, when productivity feels like someone else's problem, and you want a soundtrack that celebrates the particular freedom of having absolutely no ambitions for the next few hours.