“Yarn for Future Scarves” is the second LP of Wetsuit, the Brooklyn indie rock band of vocalist and guitarist Allison Becker, guitarist Anders Nils, and bassist Paul DeSilva, featuring drummer Tess Kramer. It is a highly anticipated follow-up to their debut, “Sugar, I’m Tired” (2023), both released by Brooklyn label and champion of women-fronted rock, Substitute Scene Records.

While “Sugar” introduced the band’s signature loud/sweet climactic jams, confessing personal woes and simple bliss, “Yarn” unravels deeper into the textural contemplation of memories. Each song stands alone as a passion-packed poem, presenting relatable contemporary life and specific personal history: Becker’s move to NYC in the summer of 2010, weaving in and out of St. Louis childhood, to present-day realizations of identity and home.

Wetsuit’s instrumentation takes new risks to communicate the intensity of these yearnings. The band journeyed to Asheville, North Carolina to work with engineer and producer Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Indigo de Souza) at Drop of Sun Studios. They lived and worked in the studio for 10 days, capturing the spirit of staples from their regular shows in the Brooklyn music scene (Can’t Hold Water, John Mulaney), and crafting new songs into their desired forms (Cider, Midwest Dream).

Mastered by Jennica Best (Colatura), “Yarn for Future Scarves” carries Wetsuit’s power of their emotional live sets while adding new layers of noise, matching the feel of New York City’s ambient fuzz, drone, and chatter.

In the opening track Cider, warm synth notes could be the hum of the AC unit in Becker’s first summer in NYC after moving from the Midwest. Nils’ masterful psychedelic guitar saunters and jabs at the mood: eyes fluttering awake to a new world. Hot garbage, gushing fire hydrants, cat pee bodegas, and ice cream truck lullabies. It’s the beginning of an album that’s all about how the sounds, smells, and surfaces of lived experience can come rushing back, a reminder of past selves, how we got here.

“Yarn for Future Scarves” is accompanied by DIY music videos for more than half of the songs, directed soley by female collaborators and often Becker herself. Like the album tracks, the visuals bubble with camp creative vision, coded by millennial nostalgia. Part rock band, part archivists, Wetsuit’s videos play around with old home movies and present-day footage. The back-and-forth nature of memory recall matches the soaring melodies that come back down. A happy childhood memory fades with the sadness of losing it.

Becker’s string of family portraiture begins with Midwest Dream, an ode to the well-deserved mundane suburban life of her mother. A heavier message lurks in the common St. Louis, Missouri saying, as Becker pleads through the screen: “If you don’t like the weather, it will go.” Life moves quickly without our control, the ebb and flow of peacefulness and melancholy.

In Sweet Sixteen, Becker’s self-conscious teenage-self adorns her bedroom with cut-up Nylon magazines, longing for the coolness of Chloe Sevigny, waiting impatiently to move to New York. It’s the in-between space, sour, before life starts. In the song Amy, Becker speaks to a younger girl, and maybe to herself, too: “Yeah, you’re gonna change…”

Identity is woven, unravels: New Yorker? Midwesterner? Cultural or religious Jew? Hashem collages Jewish summer camp song lyrics with phrases borrowed from Becker’s 93-year-old bubbe. John Mulaney gasps into questions of the complexity of American Jewish upbringing; the belief in a higher power, in a “promised land” for a chosen people. Becker is “hungry” for a different path, against the generational divide, her powerful vocal range curls up and down through life’s rollercoaster: sweet coos and growling screams, steady and wavering, slicing each message with playfulness and sharp sincerity. Through 80s pop-inspired driving beats by Kramer and DeSilva, and the motion of Nils’ warm guitar, the final songs Always Sunny and The Fog guide us back to homelife in NYC, melting into stability - winter trips to IKEA, backpack beers.

Reminiscing on the first years of living in the city, independently creating a new life out of scrappy apartments, with the sun setting later now, the songs’ bridges bloom into vocal calls, “floating” into belting, instruments rush to fill the space, and true vulnerability returns. It’s the end of the day, the song, the summer. The memory blurs back into the current place: quiet love. This was the Midwest Dream all along. Immense, pure gratitude.

Bio by Delia Rainey