By The Neck (single release)
My band Waxlimbs released our latest single By The Neck on June 28th, and now is probably a good time to write about it while it's fresh.
We started working on By The Neck in April of 2024, at Will's tiny basement studio. We had been talking about a change in direction for a while, and ended up with something promising within an hour or so of laying down ideas. We started with guitar feedback and droning piano, but ended up bringing things around to something a little more rhythmically-focused as we got the chords for the first half of the song written.
Pretty quickly, we knew we were writing a "buildup" song, and needed to hit the listener with something kind of ridiculous at the height of said buildup. We ended up taking an approach inspired by bands such as Drive Like Jehu, where repetition and tedium is the focus. We wanted the big hits in the second half to go on for an uncomfortably long time, only bringing the vocals back in when it felt like we, the listener, had earned it.
I think this song ultimately succeeded at building tension and releasing it in a satisfying way. We'd wanted to write heavier/uglier music for a while, and this felt like a good direction to start in. We'd go on to learn how to play the song live while reworking sections and adding Liv's lyrics, and performing it at virtually every show we played for about a year and a half.
For the cover art I wanted to work with Aubrey Crowe, who makes art under the name Recursion Error. Aubrey has a really compelling style, especially when it comes to fine linework and detailed illustration. I approached her for a white-on-black linework piece that resembled a bird strike pattern (the impressions birds can leave on windows they fly into) and beyond that, the piece was hers to explore and develop conceptually. We're extremely happy with the result!
By The Neck occupies a kind of weird space in our queue, in that it's the last of what we've been calling our "interstitials"; orphaned songs between albums. We've been working on our next body of work for a while now, and the process is slow. By The Neck was the last loose end after Where Lilies Grew, and anything that comes out next will be a single from our upcoming record, most likely.
Album non update
It turns out making a good record is really really hard- who knew! I think that announcing it like we did in early 2025 was a mistake on my part because I don't want people to feel strung along by our process, and I've been getting a sense that some listeners might be.
The time between the last two albums was about 4 years, and it felt shorter because we had been releasing all of the songs as singles between those dates, so it felt less empty. I really wanted to be able to avoid the proverbial disappearing act that comes with album writing, but ultimately think it may have been a better choice for us since it would have allowed us to stew on the new music with a little less pressure, self-imposed or otherwise.
The actual update is that we're making good progress but a release date is still a ways off from being decided on. We're sitting at around 11 songs, some of them nearly done, and others less so. I think a lot of these songs are the best thing we've made so far, and I can't wait to share them, but it's too soon to start teasing anything conrete. If you've been able to come to our shows in Toronto, you've heard a couple of them already! Playing everything live a few times before committing to tape, so to speak, is now an important part of our process despite the time it adds to writing and production.
If you want to stay up to date about anything Waxlimbs-related, we have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as Instagram, which is more focused on things we're doing locally in Toronto.
Hope you like the single!