Wave from the Gate

Dallas/UK songwriting collective Welcome to the 21st! have today released their fourth record, Wave from the Gate, a six-track EP available now on all streaming platforms. Produced by John Dufilho, the record finds the band at their most expansive and emotionally unguarded — spanning psychedelic post-punk, blues-soaked indie rock, alt-country folk, and hooky indie pop, while holding together as a cohesive meditation on longing, loss, and human connection.

The EP opens and closes with "Big Sky," a song three decades in the making. Written by guitarist Bob Blumenfeld in the late 1980s and brought to life with new lyrics by Touanda — inspired by the quiet estrangement at the heart of The Banshees of Inisherin — the track appears first in a lush, Wilco-inflected full arrangement and returns at the album's close stripped to just acoustic guitar and voice. Lead single "Burnout in Disguise" follows: bright, propulsive, and lyrically sharp, it wraps a meditation on modern exhaustion and the hunger for connection inside an irresistibly catchy early-2000s indie pop package, with Touanda delivering the tension between self-awareness and vulnerability with effortless cool.

"Robot Sings the Blues" offers something altogether stranger — a wah-wah-drenched, saxophone-laced blues lament sung from the perspective of a grieving mother robot, absurd on its face and devastating underneath, with echoes of Roxy Music and Mazzy Star.

The title track, "Wave from the Gate," forms the emotional core of the record: a slow-building, reverb-soaked psychedelic portrait of isolation and mental illness, its fragmented and looping lyrics mirroring the fractured interior they describe, driven by a post-punk drum beat in the spirit of Siouxsie & the Banshees and The Cure and with modern comparisons to bands like Panda Bear. Rounding out the record are "There's Nothing Here I'm Into," a wry and wistful indie pop gem about the slow drift of connection (reminiscent of Trip Shakespeare), "Rays of Sunshine," and the raw, simple electric closer "Dead" (inspired by the Smiths). Wave from the Gate is out now!