Teenage Waitress shines on ambitious new album ‘Upstairs to Finish a Dream’
Daniel Ash’s third album dares reach further than the signature bedroom pop and indie ballads of his previous two albums.
Photo: Press
Daniel Ash, the man behind electro-indie outfit Teenage Waitress, is back with his third album, Upstairs to Finish a Dream, a follow-up to 2023’s Your Cuckoo. After months of self-funding and production hell, the new LP finds familiar territory with the project’s previous work, while unashamedly marching into the unknown.
Where Ash’s prior two albums opened with slower, more electro, or more melancholic pieces, Upstairs to Finish a Dream greets the ears with a distinctly fuzzy, What’s the Story-ish half-number, Square One, before chugging straight into latest single Blue Tick Burning. A track grappling with Ash’s own mental exhaustion after a particularly busy year, Blue Tick Burning promises one of the album’s standout choruses, replete with obsessive compulsive repetition and dark humour — perhaps the quintessential Waitress sound.
Let’s Get Drunk and Watch Some Science Fiction, Pt. 1, the first of the record’s two Golden Slumbers-y interludes, precedes ’Til Tomorrow, a piece that sounds straight out of Ash’s first album, Love & Chemicals. Popcorn, an electro selection, harks back to Your Cuckoo’s Back Seat, doubling down on the Midi keys and immediately standing out as the marmite moment of Upstairs to Finish a Dream. Thankfully, it’s one of my favourites, though the top spot belongs to Maybe It’s Love, undoubtedly the focal point of this album.
With its club-like rhythm that belongs more on Charli xcx’s Brat than anything else Ash has ever done, and Keats-on-the-ether vocal delivery, Maybe It’s Love is a seven-minute spectacle by anyone’s measure, and the perfect zenith of the record’s runtime. Times Square Kiss and Best of Me, meanwhile, are phenomenal selections in their own right, bathed in La Roux-inflected synth-hop and simplistic, irresistible melodies.
The second part of the Let’s Get Drunk and Watch Some Science Fiction saga is, unlike its predecessor, bleak and melancholic, a portent of what’s to come as we enter the home stretch of Teenage Waitress’s third effort. Hollywood Honey elicits the same unsettling urgency one might get from guzzling half a bottle of Night Nurse and getting lost in the east end of London. It’s fractured, neurotic and twisted; bedfriends to a musician like Ash.
The record closes with Stupid and Strange and Disconnect — the latter of which remains one of my favourite releases of the last five years. A bit of jangly, almost-Britpop, it marks a light at the end of the tunnel for the album’s paranoid, sleepless narrator. “Come disconnect with me / Disconnect and breathe air that you’ve never known”. How can anyone say no to a sentiment like that? It’s insanely catchy to boot.
Your Cuckoo felt like a huge step forward for Ash. Where Love & Chemicals was the electro masterstroke of a bedroom pop recluse, Your Cuckoo was organic, ambitious and drew from a wider musical well.
Upstairs to Finish a Dream, then, is an interstellar hyperjump forward; the Animal Collective-esque electro on Popcorn, the orchestral flourishes of Times Square Kiss and liminal chamber-pop of ’Til Tomorrow are unlike anything Ash has approached before, or maybe will again.
Upstairs to Finish a Dream feels like a real lightning in a bottle album; a moment captured in time where we watch this singer-songwriter arrive at the peak of his artistic penmanship — Ash’s very own Wildflowers moment. As far as I’m concerned, the dream is already here, and it needs no further work.
Upstairs To Finish A Dream is out now via Chairwork Recordings.
