The blood red aesthetics of Waterparks’ longawaited fifth album, Intellectual Property, are entirely fitting: the Texan pop-rockers have always beer loud and showy and a little off-the-rails, but here they’re downright vicious. It’s their shortest album (by a whole two minutes) but it’s easily their most diverse; plot-twists are aplenty, with necksnapping shifts from saccharine pop to scorching rock, all tied together with Awsten Knight’s sharpest quips and stickiest hooks.
As the singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and creative genius tells , this record is Waterparks’ most ambitious because it to be. Their last disc, 2021’s , was a gamutspanning epic that burrowed into and made a home out of every sound they’d ever played with - which, given the band’s was their longest album (by three minutes) and ran over 17 tracks, each treated like an ultra-condensed deep-dive into one corner of their artistry. In order to avoid stagnating, the band needed to hit Intellectual Property with everything they had; no idea could be too “out there”. No stylistic leap between tracks could be too polarising.
