Nikolas Soelter has been in the music game for a while, recently breaking away from his former band Never Young and going on to produce his own music under the name Nylon Smile. This indie rock/shoegaze new album is a huge breakaway from Never Young’s heavy punk sound, and it has really allowed Soelter to explore music in a way he hadn’t before. Waiting for Oblivion was written throughout Soelter’s twenties and thus touches on topics most young adults are familiar with – loneliness, heartbreak, and freedom in finding yourself. Each song on the album expresses new feelings and experiences that the audience can relate to and allows us to see inside Soelter’s mind for a brief period of time, and isn’t that what music is all about?
The album opens with “Chemical Burn,” a song that loosely touches on substance use, but overall it more so focuses on the pressure that young people feel when thrown into the “real world” and how overwhelming the whole thing can be, hearing talking points from so many different people on so many different subjects that it’s hard to keep up. He kicks it up a notch on the next track “Only You Know,” focusing more heavily on that shoegaze guitar and specifically placed drum fills. The next few songs “Conduit” and “We Don’t Need a Reason” take on a more dream-pop sound and again deal with existential feelings of finding yourself while growing up and having to give up on a relationship, respectively. “Supreme Loneliness” and “Must be Changing” are two of my favorites off the album. They dive even deeper into Soelter’s mind while at the same time urging us as audience members to look in on ourselves and our experiences, reflecting specifically on how they shape us as people. I love this album for reasons like that – while we all do not share the same exact experiences as the singer, we can all relate to them, and even if that isn’t possible, we are able to empathize because the way these songs are composed gives you a clear look into the mind of a twenty-something-year-old going through all the struggles that one experiences in those times. He lays them out for us to see and connect with and appreciate in all their painful, heart-breaking glory.
In the interest of transparency, I hadn’t heard of Nylon Smile before reviewing this album, but I can honestly say that I will be on the lookout for any new music he produces. It’s been a while since I’ve heard an album like this and I urge everyone to at least give it a listen and see if/how you can connect with it emotionally because that is essentially what it is there for us to do. This is a hard one to break down track by track because each song can have so many meanings depending on who is listening to it and the mood you are in when listening, and I think that’s just one of the many things I love about it.
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