Waterlog: Touchscreen – Single Review

Waterlog: Touchscreen

Single – Out Now

Digital

In a time when digital saturation has become an unavoidable reality, Waterlog’s latest single Touchscreen offers a wry, rollicking reflection on our collective tech addiction. The creative brainchild of Dom Shaw (producer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy-nominated engineer for the likes of Peter Gabriel, Squid, and Saya Gray), Waterlog emerges as a fully realised musical project of vibrant guitar led musicality and a radiant sense of experimentation.

Touchscreen, the title track from Waterlog’s forthcoming EP, is a buoyant indie-rock track, carried forward by a radiant post-punk vibrancy. Bursting with frenetic rhythms from drummer Cam Steele, jagged guitar tones and grounded by the warming bass, the track dances through its first verse with quirky layers of vocals which bring biting, tongue-in-cheek humour when coupled with the on the nose lyricism.

The track then takes an unexpected shift into the more straight indie sound of the chorus before lulling into a downtempo, melancholic, whimsical middle eight. These twists and turns – tempo changes, tight shifts in guitar tones and subtle key changes – continue throughout the track, making for a unique and strikingly creative sonic experience.
Lyrically, ‘Touchscreen’ balances sharp humor with biting social commentary, encapsulating a duet between an ever-optimistic smartphone and its increasingly disillusioned user.

Dom himself describes it as “a farcical middle finger to the technology that had such an irreversible effect on me growing up. Oddly enough, the song feels more relevant now than when I wrote it.”

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All words by Simon Lucas-Hughes. More writing by Simon Lucas-Hughes can be found at his author’s archive.