California rock band Wavves is planning to make a splash in the Gainesville music scene this Saturday.
They’ll be playing their first Gainesville show at High Dive, located at 210 SW Second Ave. Doors open at 8 p.m and tickets are selling for $25 each.
Along with the band, there will be two opening acts – Tampa’s “Glove” and Orlando’s “The Amphetamines.”
The two supporting acts offer a little bit of everything for a range of rock fans. Glove’s sound has been described as resting between “punk and proto-rock” while “The Amphetamines” have been described as garage rock.
“We’re looking forward to doing what we do at every show – getting freaky,” said Glove.
The show comes as a stop on Wavves’ fall 2021 tour. The band, based in San Diego, released their seventh studio album “Hideaway” in July.’
Stephen Pope, bassist and background vocalist of Wavves, said the album’s producer, Dave Sitek, helped with the execution of their evolving sound.
Unlike past albums, which have more of a pop-punk feel, Pope said this intertwines Sitek’s country influence and slow dance tunes with songs that are true to the mosh-pit obsessed crowds that frequent Wavves shows. While mosh-pits will still be alive and well at the band’s shows, Pope said the purpose behind this different sound is to get more people in the audience to hold each other and slow dance.
“The two songs I’m really looking forward to playing are ‘Sinking Feeling’ and ‘Caviar,’” Pope said.
While “Sinking Feeling” is a twist on the beachy pop-rock sound that the band has built their sound on, “Caviar” is a ballad fit for the slow dancing that Pope said the band wants to see at their shows.
The band has been in the music industry for over a decade now. Last year, it celebrated its 10-year anniversary.
“We’ve evolved a lot more musically than we have professionally,” said Pope.
Instead of having songwriting that delves into having depression and anxiety, topics that are personal to the band, Pope said that as the band gets older, they now write about the way that they’ve dealt with these issues.
“Now when we write, it’s more about the light at the end of the tunnel,” said Pope.
While the band has played Florida shows in the past in cities like Tampa and Jacksonville, it’s never played in Gainesville. With the rich, surging culture of local alternative bands, Wavves may have found the perfect audience for their crowd surfing, slow dancing range of tunes.
Gainesville is already a home to local indie and alternative bands, but today, Wavves is crashing the scene and is holding their first concert to a crowd that is bound to welcome them with open arms.
Contact Anushka at adakshit@alligator.org. Follow her on Twitter @anushkadak.
Anushka Dakshit is a fourth-year journalism and women’s studies major and the general reporter on the University desk of The Alligator. She started out as an arts and culture reporter at The Avenue and hopes to pursue arts and culture reporting and print magazine journalism in her career. Along with The Alligator, she is one of the Print Editorial Directors of Rowdy Magazine. In her free time, she likes to listen to old Bollywood music, read and obsess over other writers’ processes whenever she has no idea what she’s doing (which is often).
