Ace of Wands have been building toward Future Wave since they played their first show in 2017, and the album arrives knowing exactly what it is. Thirteen songs recorded at ProGold Studios in Toronto with Canadian rock legend Ian Blurton producing, engineering, and mixing, the record captures what Lee Rose, Anna Mernieks, and Jody Brumell have been doing live for years, explosive and emotionally raw Dream Rock that sounds like it shouldn’t be possible from three people, and commits it to tape with the clarity and force that three years of writing and a rigorous pre-production process can produce.
Rose is a classically trained violinist who plays violin, guitar, and synth-bass foot pedals simultaneously while singing. The physical fact of that performance matters because it shapes the sound: the orchestral textures that run through Future Wave aren’t additions to a rock record, they’re native to how Rose makes music. Mernieks on guitar and Brumell on drums complete a trio whose chemistry, according to Rose, elevated the material to a depth and grit that had been waiting to be fully realized. Blurton’s production serves that chemistry without overriding it, his ear trained on identifying and elevating the strongest element of each song rather than imposing a signature from outside.
“Black River” opens the album with water imagery that will run through the whole record, the river a metaphor for the kind of love that asks you to endure time rather than possess it. “Roll on the wave, black river / endure the time to get next to you / no shadow mars the shimmer” is the album’s first clear articulation of its central tension: patience in the face of forces that move according to their own logic. The title track follows with the album’s governing emotion laid bare. “There may be fire in the future but I’m in love again” arrives in the chorus as both acknowledgement of risk and refusal to be deterred by it, the fear and the hope occupying the same line without canceling each other out.
“Uncanny,” released ahead of the album and previously reviewed here, earns its place in sequence. Rose’s lyric about the constructed social media self, the uncanny double built through the pursuit of validation, moves through classical compositional structures before landing on “the uncanny self, she was meant to be hurt” as the coldest and most precise line on the record. It’s followed by “Violator,” which strips the gothic atmosphere down to something rawer and more urgent. “I was never safe in this / losing to a warm body / took it in your hand / you violator, don’t touch me” arrives after verses of weight and suppression, the chorus building from “heavy” to the final “fuck off don’t touch me” with a directness that the rest of the album’s poetic register earns rather than undermines.
“Edge of the Edge” is the album’s most purely euphoric moment, the love song as spatial experience, stars caught in blackness, footsteps spiraling and trembling. “You keep me from falling / we’ve already fell / at the edge of the edge” holds the paradox of love that grounds you by taking you somewhere vertiginous. “Drive” works through obsession and the compulsion to repeat patterns, “like a splinter in the mind that’s compelled to entertain,” while “Burn Upon It” channels the feeling of time slipping into a brief, compressed statement that hits harder for its brevity.
“Magical Mind” is one of the album’s most beautiful tracks, its imagery of slowing time to beat the fall, of a magical mind revealed through the process, carrying a warmth that balances the darker material surrounding it. “It’s Easy” turns that darkness back outward with wry self-awareness: “pursuing fame like a mad dog / the deceiver / I dance around creating / but in my heart, I agonize.” After hurt accumulates happiness, Rose sings, the line landing differently each time it returns.
“Specter” offers forgiveness as its resolution, the speaker reckoning with a parent whose inner life remained unknown until it was too late. “What were the dreams you had? / I realize I never knew / knowing only my world revolved / on the energy of you” is the album’s most quietly devastating lyric. “Oleanders,” named for a plant that is both beautiful and poisonous, runs love and death together with the line “oleanders running up the walls.” “Wanting” closes the album’s lyrical concerns with the tension between desire and shame, between the self that wants and the heart that’s full, the question of whether those two things can coexist without resolution.
“Spiral Woman” ends the record with Rose’s most physically immediate lyric, bodies and curves and mirrors, the spiral as both pattern and practice, learning a form through embrace rather than instruction. It closes an album about time, love, fear, and perseverance on a note of motion rather than arrival. The wave keeps rolling. Ace of Wands are still in it.
Future Wave is available everywhere now.
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