wakelee release Under Construction Forever and walk through all 11 tracks

Brooklyn emo rockers wakelee have released their new album, Under Construction Forever. The record is out now via Wax Bodega and spans eleven tracks that stretch the band's sound with folk, indie rock and alternative touches.

Lyrically, the album deals with apathy, disappointment, exhaustion, burnout and the tangle of feelings that comes with growing up. To mark the release, guitarist and vocalist Alex Bulmer gave Punknews a track-by-track breakdown of how the songs took shape.

The opener, Bulmer said, arrived after several days of writer's block, and the band was so relieved to be inspired that they never second-guessed its short, direct structure. "Yes It Does" was the most collaborative song on the record: Chris and Alex started a version in Los Angeles, the band reworked it in New York, and the structure was hashed out over sushi at David's apartment in sessions Bulmer compared to a class presentation.

Some tracks changed form entirely. One began as a heavy song in a low tuning, but the finished arrangement left the band uneasy, so they flipped it into an acoustic number, recording the guitars with the drum mic setup from the loud version. "Box Fan" traces back to a fall 2024 studio session in Toronto, while "JKSA" came together fastest of anything on the album.

Bulmer also pointed to the listening that fed the record. A second-verse drum groove was modeled on The Beths' "Out of Sight," and the band's experiments with wall-of-sound textures came from spending time with Hotline TNT and Power of Falling. The closing track went the opposite route of the acoustic flip: a quiet, folkier version was blown up into something big, and its atmospheric outro made it the obvious finale.