Brooklyn’s indie rock outfit Wetsuit have returned with their second LP, Yarn for Future Scarves, released on August 22, 2025, via Substitute Scene Records. Following their acclaimed debut Sugar, I’m Tired in 2023, the band—vocalist and guitarist Allison Becker, guitarist Anders Nils, bassist Paul DeSilva, and drummer Tess Kramer—step into deeper, denser waters, stitching together an album that feels both intimate and sprawling, personal and universal. Where Sugar introduced listeners to Wetsuit’s cathartic mix of loud/soft dynamics and climactic jams, Yarn unravels into the textured contemplation of memory and identity, creating a sonic quilt of lived experience.
The record was born from Becker’s own journey of leaving St. Louis and moving to New York in 2010, a time when the city felt overwhelming yet electric, filled with both nostalgia for what was left behind and excitement for what was ahead. Each track stands as a small poem, passionate and packed with detail, that carries with it fragments of Becker’s history and self-discovery. What elevates the project even further is the band’s willingness to take new risks with instrumentation and production.
Traveling to Asheville, North Carolina, they recorded the LP with engineer and producer Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios, known for work with Wednesday and Indigo de Souza. The band lived in the studio for ten straight days, channeling the energy of their regular Brooklyn sets and reshaping it into a record that balances raw urgency with crafted precision. The finishing touch came from Jennica Best of Colatura, who mastered the album, lending its final sound the grit of New York’s streets alongside moments of shimmering warmth.
The opening track “Cider” sets the scene. Warm synths buzz like the hum of a rattling AC in a sweltering New York apartment, while Nils’ guitar swirls and stabs with psychedelic inflection. Becker’s lyrics draw on sensory details—trash baking in the sun, ice cream truck jingles, fire hydrants bursting—as the music builds into a portrait of awakening, of being fully alive in an unfamiliar world. It’s a song that makes you feel the disorientation of starting fresh in a city that never pauses for breath.
From there, the record winds into Midwest Dream, Becker’s ode to her mother and the stability of suburban life left behind. It’s contemplative, folding in the St. Louis saying, “If you don’t like the weather, it will go,” as a metaphor for life’s impermanence. The track finds peace in mundane details, but always with a heavier shadow lurking beneath. Sweet Sixteen looks back on the uncertainty and longing of teenage years—magazine cut-outs taped to walls, impatient dreams of a bigger city, and the sour taste of waiting for life to begin. The band plays it with jittery urgency, perfectly capturing the in-between feeling of adolescence.
One of the record’s most compelling moments comes with Amy, where Becker sings to a younger girl—and perhaps to her past self—offering the kind of wisdom that only comes with hindsight: “Yeah, you’re gonna change.” The delivery is both tender and urgent, a reminder of transformation’s inevitability.
Elsewhere, Wetsuit turn their gaze toward identity and heritage. Hashem stitches together Jewish summer camp songs with lines borrowed from Becker’s ninety-three-year-old grandmother, while John Mulaney weaves in questions about cultural upbringing, faith, and the generational divides that shape who we are. These tracks push the band into deeply personal but widely relatable territory, with Becker’s vocal delivery veering between cooing sweetness and guttural screams that cut right through the haze of guitars and drums.
Throughout the album, there’s an audible tension between memory’s beauty and its burden. Can’t Hold Water explores the futility of trying to hold onto fragile relationships, while 107.7 plays like a collage of home movies turned into sound. The inclusion of DIY visuals to accompany more than half of the songs underscores this connection between music and memory. In the video for Cider, Becker performs in a giant picnic blanket dress in a Brooklyn backyard, surrounded by friends, evoking nostalgia coded in millennial aesthetics. In Can’t Hold Water, her costumes blend seamlessly into their surroundings, a literal visual metaphor for how identity shifts depending on context.
As the album moves toward its close, Always Sunny and The Fog guide listeners back to a sense of stability. The imagery here is everyday—trips to IKEA, beers carried in backpacks, the ordinary rhythms of New York life. But in Wetsuit’s hands, these moments feel profound, shimmering with gratitude and love. The final tracks bloom with instrumental surges that mirror the rush of recollection before softening into quiet acceptance. It’s the sound of a band not just recalling memories but making peace with them, layering melancholy with hope.
What makes Yarn for Future Scarves remarkable is its cohesion. Each song stands firmly on its own, but together, they feel like threads in a larger fabric—woven by memory, nostalgia, identity, and the messy, unpredictable act of growing into yourself. The instrumentation pushes beyond the loud-soft tropes of their debut, embracing noise, fuzz, drone, and pop-inspired beats. Becker’s background as a fiber artist even finds its way into the record’s DNA; like yarn woven into scarves, the songs feel tactile, textured, and crafted with hands that know the value of imperfection.
With their second album, Wetsuit prove they’re not just another Brooklyn indie band chasing hype. They’re archivists of memory, builders of soundscapes that shimmer with honesty, and explorers of how the personal becomes universal. Yarn for Future Scarves is a triumph of emotional storytelling, sonic experimentation, and raw vulnerability. It’s an album that lingers, like the faint scent of summer on a scarf pulled out in winter—both a reminder of what’s past and a comfort for what lies ahead.
On Yarn for Future Scarves, Wetsuit transform memory into melody, weaving the sounds of personal history into something big enough for all of us to wear. This is their most ambitious work yet, and it’s clear: Wetsuit have grown into a band whose music doesn’t just tell stories, it preserves them.
