I saw the Strokes perform at the O2 in London recently. During their set they performed the track The Adults Are Talking, which throbs with a kind of stringy krautrock-influenced thrill. Sharp percussion and fuzzy bass propel the song as a pair of guitars create a kind of aloof yearning unique to the Strokes. Julian Casablancas retains his cool even as his vocal nears a kind glasslike fragility more familiar to Thom Yorke.
I’ve listened to that song about 40 times since that concert, and every time it ends I still want to hear it again. Hitting play on the new single from Wallners, Movie Stars, I found myself pouring into my brain what feels like the same song but craft out of some sort of galactic space rock from an alternative galaxy. Familiarly angular drums combine with evocative guitar melodies, and yet where the Strokes channel their distinctive New York aesthetic, Wallners have something that is more shoegaze in nature, yet just as thrilling.
Crystalline guitars hover as vocals shift and mutate, instrument-like in their aesthetic. The taut percussion, functional and grounded, only highlights the sense of altitude that opens up elsewhere here. Reverb kicks in like a rush of blood to the head, guitars screeching and howling, and yet never anything but angelic and beautiful. Movie Stars sounds like seeing everyone you love slipping away for the last time as you look back at the earth shrink to a dot. It is both beautiful and terrifying.
Accompanied by a music video directed by award-winning filmmaker Rupert Höller. Shot entirely on 16mm film, it accentuates the feeling of the song through the use of handmade sets, without the use of any AI.
Wallner are comprised of four siblings from Vienna, and Movie Stars follows on from the group’s debut album, End of Circles, and a 29-date headline tour. Marking the start of their work on a second album, Movie Stars was influenced by a set of old microphones from the 1960s discovered in their basement. The group describe the resulting sound as being somewhere between Mazzy Star and Daft Punk, which is a fantastic description if ever I heard one. Beyond the Strokes, I have spent much of my summer listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl so in Love, and there feels like a commonality in inspiration here, even where the end products differ. But maybe I’m just floating in a Petri dish of similar emotions…
In addition to listening in the post, you can find almost all the music BlackPlastic covers on the music player of your choice. Add the dedicated playlist below: