Surprise Wish

Description

Surprise Wish is the second album from indie-rock project Dari Bay, hailing from Burlington, Vermont, and their first release on Double Double Whammy. Following the cult success of their debut album, Longest Day of the Year (2023), songwriter Zack James refines the project's sound, giving it a more direct and visceral dimension: saturated guitars, hypnotic rhythms, and intimate, spontaneous vocals. Coming from a family of musicians in Brattleboro, Vermont, James spent years immersed in the local DIY scene: he has played with artists like Lily Seabird and Greg Freeman, composed for the band Robber Robber, and toured with Unknown Mortal Orchestra. With Surprise Wish, he distills this experience into his most accomplished compositions to date. Written largely alone over the course of a year, as James was finishing his studies and juggling several projects, the album adopts a raw and authentic approach. Rather than conforming to the aesthetic codes of a genre, James prioritized instinct and immediacy, building his songs around sudden and persistent ideas. The result is an album that fuses 90s alt-rock, indie, and slacker rock into music that is both familiar and refreshingly new. Across its nine tracks, Surprise Wish captures the strange emotional territory of early adulthood: a life shaped by the internet, isolation, friendship, precarious situations, and glimmers of fragile hope. Tracks like the saturated rock of "The Joke," the spiraling character study "Chevy," and the cathartic single "We're Gonna Be Okay" marry distorted guitars with introspective, lucid lyrics tinged with a dry humor. Both raw and assured, Surprise Wish paints a portrait of a person in the making.