REVIEW: Wisp - If Not Winter

shh, music is good

38:13 // August 1st, 2025 // Music Soup

Imagine the most pleasant and comforting thing you can. Surely, there’s no controversy surrounding this amazing wonderfully lovel- nvm, this is the internet, we are people, of course there’s hashtag discourse. See, to me there are few things more soothing than shoegaze: a genre that seems so inherently inoffensive that you wouldn’t exactly expect a lot of controversy to surround its key players. Enter Wisp, an American musician capable of making good music and also capable of making me feel old. It’s impossible to talk about Wisp’s music without addressing the Conversation surrounding her existence as a highly digitally literate musician in a genre pretending to still be deeply analogue - however, I mostly want to talk about the music, so… let’s get it over with? Tl;dr time! Wisp’s most well-known and well-streamed songs feature instrumentals purchased on a digital online world wide web website (common practice for some genres, uncommon practice for shoegaze, I guess). Also, Wisp might not have perfected their live sound just quite yet (how dare a semi-teenager not be impeccable at combining sixty pedals on a stage from the start). While there are things to be said about the systemic failures of paying producers fairly when a certain track achieves unexpected success, I feel like there is way more to be said about the collective, non-centralised online smear campaigns against the newest crop of shoegaze artists that are a fair deal less white and less male than any previous generations. Cool, tl;dr done, let’s dig into how Wisp’s debut album sounds and, you know, feeeels.

Above all, If Not Winter embodies pure bliss for fans of thick, crunchy and grungy gaze. Within the realm of hard-hitting, soft-sounding layers of fuzzed out guitars, this album introduces itself like few others: opening cuts “Sword” and “Breathe onto me” beautifully showcase multiple angles of Wisp’s deeply immersive soundscape. The former focuses on tried-and-true quiet-loud dynamics and nails the all-encompassing walls of sound multiple times within its brief two minutes, while the latter transforms a conventional mid-tempo rocker into starry-eyed euphoria the way only the gazification of fifteen layers of sonic dissonance could. Moreover, these opening cuts introduce Natalie Lu’s perfect vocals: they’re buried yet entirely audible, and gorgeously detached. Throughout the album, her voice glides across the calmly collapsing web of sounds with ease, demanding attention yet perfectly slotting into each melody. If Not Winter is at its very best when these melodies pair their buttery smoothness with the soft assault of an indistinguishable amount of feedback crawling in and out of focus. The aptly titled “Mesmerized” forms a highlight as it effortlessly transforms an incredibly dense riff into something that can only be described as one brilliantly fleshed out, minutes-long sparkly hum. It’s a kind of peace many artists chase, and few achieve.

While Wisp manages to remain admirably consistent across If Not Winter’s twelve songs, there are moments where things can get a little homogenous. This homogeneity is entirely enjoyable and pretty-sounding, but it can be hard to shake the feeling that a little tweaking of the album’s sequencing could have benefitted the overall experience. As mentioned previously, the two openers present some of the record’s strongest moments: the primary downside is that they also show Wisp’s full hand from the jump. Subsequent tracks largely colour within the lines of these first few songs - thicc riffs, quiet-loud contrasts, spaced out choruses - but do not expand upon their palettes. It’s the very thing that allows detractors to point and shout (...type in all caps) words along the lines of “generic” and “derivative”, which are… accurate by design. If Not Winter is clearly not meant to be a unique experience expanding on whatever came before: instead, it takes some of the best parts of several generations of gaze and blends them into a heavenly 38-minute experience. It bleeds together a little, but never loses its calming aura and remains entirely dedicated to weaving a web of feedback-soaked goodness.

Most importantly, If Not Winter is a debut album by a very young musician. It’s a very good album, and an even better first album: there’s enough substance here to allow for multiple dedicated listens, and it’s consistently soothing enough to function as summery background music. Whatever comes next for Wisp will be interesting to see and, above all, hear. It will undoubtedly come with the complaints of several Reddit users, but their disembodied voices can be drowned out by listening to “Guide light”s onslaught of feedback or be lullabied into submission by experiencing “All i need” in all its hauntingly acoustic glory. Music is good, music is nice, and it’s okay to enjoy music.

7.5/10