Strange Company – Unveil Expansive New Single ‘Waves’

Following the success of their return with Do You Feel Numb?, South Wales alt-rock quintet Strange Company are following it up with another brand new single. Titled Waves, the new single sees Strange Company exploring darker aspects to their sound, with a sonic approach that walks the tightrope between post-hardcore and post-rock, taking elements of both and creating an absorbing, unique song that will have listeners hitting repeat over and over. 

Strange Company guitarist Owen Weston expands on how Waves came to be:

“Sonically, ‘Waves’ ended up on the darker and more atmospheric side of our spectrum. When I first wrote the bare bones of the song, I was listening to a lot of Citizen, which definitely came through in the emo-leaning feel of the original demo. Once I took it to the boys, though, every element of the song seemed to get heavier. We added delayed guitars, swelling textures and echoed vocals, which transformed it into a much denser, more evolving soundscape. Alef and I have always had a real love for shoegaze, and I think that comes through pretty clearly in the final mix. It’s been really interesting hearing that version alongside the original demo and seeing how far the song evolved.

Lyrically, the song continues the themes we started exploring with our previous release, ‘Do You Feel Numb?’. ‘Waves’ is about those points in life where you suddenly find yourself somewhere — good or bad — without really understanding how you got there, or where you’re supposed to go next. I originally wrote the chorus lyric, “Where are we going? Where have we been?” as a placeholder, fully intending to come back to it and replace it with something more poetic or clever. But we all loved the simplicity of those lines, and the more we lived with them, the more we realised they said exactly what we wanted them to.

Sometimes there’s no need to overcomplicate it.”

The video for Waves, like the video for Do You Feel Numb?, is a cinematic piece that can can be interpreted by those watching in many ways. Filmed at Aberavon Beach in South Wales, it had the band wanting to bring a physical reality to the track, as bassist Josef Lovett explains:

“For the video, we wanted to build a very literal visual world around the song — something that could bring the lyrical themes to life and give shape to the world we’d been imagining since we first started writing and recording these songs. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to use a lot of water, waves and submerged imagery to evoke those feelings of desperation, struggle and being completely out of your depth.

The video is entirely narrative-driven, with no traditional band performance shots, so we knew we had to create something that could hold your attention and tell a story on its own. It was a really exciting challenge, and we feel like we’ve created something that captures the atmosphere of the song while also taking that world somewhere of its own.“