Once a month, Consequence proudly highlights an artist who’s poised for the big time with our CoSign accolade. For March 2024, that title goes to 19-year-old nu-gazer Wisp and her debut EP, Pandora.
Wisp is like any other music-obsessed 19-year-old: she loves talking tunes with friends, she posts Topsters on her Instagram to show off her ever-developing taste, and she almost instantly became a leading figure of the shoegaze revival with her first-ever release, “Your face.” On second thought, that last one might just be a her thing…
“It’s been really exciting,” the artist tells Consequence of her quick and continuing rise. “I wasn’t expecting it at all because I kind of just posted it online for fun. I thought it was a cool song, but I didn’t expect much out of it.”
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And yet, much is exactly what she got. The irresistible, distortion-soaked track currently sits at over 45 million streams on Spotify, and it’s not hard to understand why. Perfectly toying with tension and release, the song swings between fuzzy and FUZZY in a way that scratches a deep, pedal-board-gazing itch. Supplemented with her saturated, ethereal vocals, the song so perfectly taps into buzzy shoegaze aesthetics that one might suspect it to be the product of a writing team of contemporary indie rock tastemakers. In reality, it’s simply the work of a teenage girl with a knack for satisfying song structures and heavy-as-hell tones, a teenage girl whose previous musical experiences didn’t extend beyond her school’s band and noodling away in her bedroom.
“I grew up listening to a lot of dream pop, and I was also put onto older rock when I was like 12. It was that kind of music that started getting me into shoegaze,” she recalls. “I just discovered it for what it was, not knowing it was called shoegaze, but I really liked the sound of it, and how they have really hard drops in their music — that was my favorite part about it. I would just make super long playlists of dream pop and shoegaze, and then I found out what the genre ‘actually meant’ and got more into it.”
Becoming obsessed with Deftones and Whirr (her Instagram handle is @whirrwhoreforlyfe), Wisp got swept up in the swirling sonic universe such bands embody, discovering new music and a thriving community.
“The shoegaze community is definitely interesting, but they’re really cool and I love it,” she says. “I think it’s really cool to see a new generation of shoegaze, and kind of the revival of it in a way. But they’re [also] making it their own sound, and it’s something that’s totally different from what shoegaze used to be.”