Pulling Leaves Off Trees

"Pulling Leaves off Trees" is early Wallows, pre-album, and it sounds like a band figuring out in real time that they're good at melancholy. The recording is noticeably rawer than their later work — jangly, reverb-heavy guitars with a surf-adjacent shimmer, a live-sounding drum kit with room bleed, a bassline that occasionally overreaches. There's a lo-fi warmth here that the professional records traded away for clarity. The vocal is thin and boyish, the harmonies loose in a way that reads as friendship rather than technique, and the whole thing carries the specific charm of songs made in a garage by people who genuinely like being in a room together. The title image does the lyrical heavy lifting: idle destruction as a way to pass time, the small fidgety cruelty of being bored and unhappy at once. It circles adolescent restlessness without naming it, which is more effective than the naming would have been. Context: this was the era when Wallows were an internet-word-of-mouth band with a handful of singles, before the *13 Reasons Why* spotlight and the label machinery, and fans still treat these early tracks as the truer version. Right for an aimless afternoon walk with nowhere to be.