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“Why just make an album when you can make a movie and a book as well, you know?” they laugh in the middle of our conversation. A beat. “There’s the easy way… and then there’s what we would do.”
That line sums up the entire era they’re about to enter: louder, faster, more chaotic, more honest, and way more work than it technically needs to be. But for a band that’s been slowly mutating since 2006, doing things the hard way has become its own kind of medicine.
The New Era: Maturity at Full Speed
Ask Inner Wave what makes this chapter different, and the first word that comes back is “maturity.”
Not in the boring “we’re settling down” sense. More like: a decade and a half of life, grief, touring, and self-interrogation packed into songs that are somehow more up-tempo and more emotionally heavy at the same time.
“A lot of life has happened,” they say. They spent years on the road, then almost two years off of it, holed up at home writing. That long pause re-wired something. The band realized the songs that exploded the hardest live were always the faster, sweatier ones, the tracks that made crowds actually jump, not just sway.
So the new record leans into that. More guitar. More attitude. More of the garage-rock DNA that formed the band’s earliest skeleton back in 2006, when they were just kids figuring it out in a room, cranking amps too loud on purpose.
“We grew up with that garage rock kind of inspiration,” they explain.
“We’re tapping into that feeling again, more guitar-heavy, more uptempo. Stuff that’s fun to play live.”
Fun is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Underneath it is something else: that creeping realization you get in your 20s that joy itself is a survival skill. If their last album Apoptosis was introspective and meticulously constructed, this one feels like getting in a car with your friends at night, hitting the freeway, and not checking the map.
To them, the record “feels like a road trip… like going on tour.” That’s not just aesthetic, it’s the frame for the entire project.
Touring as a Road Trip Through the Psyche
Inner Wave didn’t stop at “it feels like tour” and call it a day. They built an entire universe around that feeling: an album, a film, and a lyric-photo book that all orbit the same question:
What does it actually do to your mind to live on the road as a musician in 2025?
The film is a satirical comedy horror about being a touring band right now. It’s part love letter to the grind, part fever dream about its absurdities.The album plays like the soundtrack, the film like the shared dream, and the road itself becomes the therapist’s couch.
It’s also where their perspective has clearly shifted. They’re still writing about love and loss – “the classic stuff,” as they shrug – but from a different vantage point now. Not the first heartbreak, but what comes after. Not just escape, but consequence.
The comedy horror tone is a tell: when reality starts to feel unreal, sometimes the only honest way to portray it is to bend it even further.
18 Years Indie, Then a Label: Growing Up Without Giving In
They’ve been a band for nearly two decades, spending 18–19 years totally independent, building their own universe, fanbase, and aesthetic from scratch, mostly by feel. No safety net. Just a long, slow grind and a lot of trial-and-error.
“We did most of our career just figuring out the foundation of what we want to create and what kind of universe we want people to live in,”
Only now, after all that, have they linked up with an independent label – not as an origin story, but as a late-stage evolution. Not “please discover us,” but “help us scale what we already are.”
The way they describe it is less “we got signed” and more “we hired reinforcements.” Their creative process is still very much their own. The team’s job is to take the band’s already fully formed world and project it further: more reach, more possibilities, more infrastructure for the things they never grew up knowing how to do.
It’s one of the most quietly radical things about this era: the refusal to frame adulthood in music as either total DIY martyrdom or total industry assimilation. Inner Wave found a third thing – staying weird and self-directed while finally admitting they can’t (and don’t want to) do everything alone.
If adolescence is about rejecting your parents’ script, this feels like young adulthood done right: knowing your values well enough that when you finally invite a “system” in, it’s on your terms.
Band as Chosen Family, Project as Relay Race
For all the talk of films and horror and industry shifts, one of the most touching pieces of this whole thing is how many fingerprints are on it.
The lyric-photo book is packed with contributions from friends: “Razy Faouri, Cloudy, Rhyan Santos, Abraham Recio, Gomi Zhou, Jean-Pierre, Cruz himself, and more”. The cover art, which doubles as the movie poster in an alternate form, was another group effort, passed between collaborators like a sacred object.
They describe the project as a relay race: one person runs their segment, shoots the photos, designs the poster, edits a scene, and then hands it off to the next. No one is carrying the baton alone; they’re all just making sure it keeps moving forward.
Even inside the band, that dynamic is present. Cruz joined later, so when they play older songs like “Jerry,” he talks about performing them from this double perspective: part band member, part fan. That’s such a specific kind of love, learning to inhabit something you once only watched from the outside.
Hitting the Road Again
After two years at home obsessing over this world they’re about to drop, Inner Wave’s next move is simple: tour. A lot.
They’re itching to get back out, to test these faster songs in real rooms again, to stretch them, reinterpret them live, mess with them visually and sonically. There’s talk of an expanded Asia run, of finally getting to Japan. Of bringing this whole tornado of a project to as many cities as will have them.
They say it with a grin: “Invite us to your city. We’ll be there. Buy the tickets.”
The album cover is the movie poster. The movie poster is the album cover. The book is the behind-the-scenes of the thing that may or may not have happened exactly the way they show it. The songs are the fuel. The tour is the test.
For Inner Wave, this isn’t just a rollout. It’s a full-body check-in: Who are we now? Who were we in that garage in 2006? What parts of that kid version of us did we keep, and what parts did we have to kill off? How do you grow up without getting boring – or losing yourself in the noise?
They don’t give you clean answers. Instead, they hand you a movie, a book, a record, and a ticket, and ask you to ride shotgun while they figure it out in real time.
