Band names are a commitment you make before you know what you’re committing to. Deep Wimp chose theirs eight years ago and has spent eight years living inside it, which is either profound self-awareness or a mistake that became a philosophy. Listening to Longtime Beginner, I keep landing on both. The name prepares you for something specific: self-deprecating, a little awkward, comfortable with limitation.
And then the record opens and Charlie Waters‘s vocal comes in raspy and completely committed on “First-Time Caller” and the energy is the opposite of limited. Loud, direct, guitar-forward, immediately recognizable to anyone who grew up with Car Seat Headrest or Joyce Manor. The gap between what the name suggests and what the music delivers and that gap is the whole point. Deep Wimp have been making this case for eight years. Longtime Beginner is the strongest version of it yet.
Something about the runtime: 25 minutes, 8 tracks. That’s almost aggressively compact. Most indie rock records arrive overstuffed, convinced that more material signals more ambition. This one runs in the other direction: an album where you spend zero time waiting for something to happen, because Deep Wimp seem to have decided that a song overstaying its welcome is a failure of craft. They cut accordingly. The discipline required for that, after eight years of accumulated material, is underrated.
Fatherhood runs through the album as a theme, alongside nostalgia, alongside what the press materials describe as “against-all-odds optimism.” That last phrase is more specific than it sounds. Against-all-odds is past naivety: it’s aware of the odds, has looked at them, and decided to proceed. “Confetti” captures that state precisely: “my friends are scattered confetti / celebration mementos / I wish my hands would stay steady / I’d reach out and pull them close.” That’s a lyric about adult grief, the specific kind that comes from watching friendships scatter under the weight of different lives and different cities, and it lands with minimal explanation and lean production. Deep Wimp are writing about ordinary difficulty and making it matter, which is a skill that louder and more ambitious bands frequently lack.
“Thumbs Up” is the track where most of the album’s emotional intelligence gathers, and I want to spend some time here. The song opens with: “sitting in the backyard at dark / nobody could see the stars.” By the time it closes (same location, different people, “everybody was seeing stars”) and something has shifted. Same backyard. Different sky. The song declines to explain what changed. It just registers that it did, and that restraint is exactly right for a record full of people reaching for things they struggle to hold. I’d call it the best song on the album, understanding that “best” is doing a lot of work depending on your mood and what you’re coming to the record wanting.
“Giant” and “Pipe Dream” are the two overtly big songs: “Giant” with a U2-adjacent build I initially resisted and eventually surrendered to (it earns it), “Pipe Dream” aiming at stadium anthems from inside an indie record that presumably plays mid-sized venues. Both land. “First-Time Caller” opens the whole thing with that hangover energy and raspy guitar forward momentum, and it’s the right door to walk through. These three songs are where Deep Wimp sound most like the bands in the press materials and also most like themselves, which is a trick that took them some time to pull off.
“Wheelhouse” is the most commercially direct moment here, clean pop-rock that sits comfortably where it’s placed and does its job. “Handsome” covers some of the same ground as “Giant” and falls short of the same altitude. Looser, slightly less resolved, the energy of a song that found its first half and is figuring out the second while the tape runs. I’d be misleading you if I called it a highlight. I’d also be misleading you if I said it drags the album down, because “Bright Balloon” and “Thumbs Up” cover the cost.
“Bright Balloon” might be the most openly earnest thing Deep Wimp have recorded: a guitar riff that sets the temperature before the first lyric, the whole song refusing irony, clearly meant for a specific person and fully transparent about it. Whether it’s the best track on the record depends on the day, which seems like the right answer for something this warmly constructed.
Eight years together and they called the third album Longtime Beginner. That name, like the band name, is doing more than it first appears to. By the time “Thumbs Up” ends with people laughing under stars that were invisible a few minutes earlier, the title lands differently than it did at the start. Deep Wimp know what they’re doing. They’ve known for a while. They just refuse to pretend that knowing what you’re doing makes any of this easier, and that refusal, sustained across 25 minutes of genuinely good indie rock, is what makes Longtime Beginner worth your time.
All information provided is prepared in accordance with editorial standards and is intended to offer useful insights for readers. Please note that the opinions, interpretations, and evaluations expressed by the author may substantially differ from the viewpoints of our readers or the general public at large, and we respect the diversity of opinions.
