“Waiting Game,” Junior Boys’ first album in six years, is a at once luxurious and somber, withdrawn, and isolated. It has a few of the prettiest songs the group has ever done and it also has a feel of desolation and exhaustion. Jeremy Greenspan’s voice, which is usually so present and central on their albums, is rarely unfiltered or unmodified on this album—it’s shifted, garbled, mechanized, or sped up on almost every one of the album’s tracks.
“Big Black Coat,” the group’s last album, was enjoyable but a little thin—it felt like a more brittle record, less stable, and maybe that was to reflect what Greenspan mentioned as one of the inspirations for the album, the lonely guys he saw wandering around Hamilton, Ontario, frustrated by life. “Waiting Game” returns to the high-level sound design that Junior Boys have deployed throughout most of their albums—the depth of sound they achieve is hard to believe.
Greenspan has mentioned in interviews that, before “Waiting Game,” he built a studio in Hamilton with a dedicated synth room and mixing room, acquired new tape machines, and spent a lot of the early pandemic years learning how to use and calibrate his studio equipment. Greenspan also mentioned that he’d been worn out by how loud music had become and wanted to make something quieter and deeper.
If you’re not a hardcore audiophile, you might think, okay, whatever, but you can totally hear it on these new songs—the sound feels endlessly deep, endlessly sharp. “Might Be All the Wrong Things” and “Night Walk,” the first two tracks on the album, really show off how hypnotizing this is. “Might Be All the Wrong Things,” now probably in my top-10 Junior Boys songs, feels so slight at first, but it’s a spectacle, a simple construction of tones that spins out into its own world, a quick hit of bass, and then Greenspan’s vocals, one line sung sweetly, rippled out to dissipate over the course of the track. “Night Walk” has the kind of synth sounds that I’ve only ever heard from Junior Boys, these low, rich tones that seem to rise up out of nowhere and disappear again. Over a little click beat that’s a little reminiscent of the “Hotline Bling” beat, Greenspan sings, “I’ve been going out at night/I’m walking right past the signs/about it/but when something’s right it’s just right.”
The title track has a more classic Junior Boys feel, sweetly romantic, although Greenspan’s vocals on this track are shifted a little lower, hidden. Greenspan sings, “I like coming over, baby/it matters in a waiting game/when all you have is too much time now, darling/you waste the best of days.” Later, one of the coolest moments on the album, when the song makes a new reveal: halfway through the song, Greenspan steps out from behind the vocal effects and sings clearly, “Hold a lantern to what’s yours/mine is all what’s been spreading on the floor/’cause I’m living on an island and everything works out/why is that a problem/some things work out that way,” then a long, slow sax solo takes the track to its end. Beautiful song, beautiful record.