There is a telling moment buried in the story of wakelee Under Construction Forever, the Brooklyn trio’s sophomore album: the band describe sitting in a van for 35 nights on a spring 2026 tour alongside Macseal, one of the indie and emo acts they had grown up listening to. By the end of those weeks on the road, an old influence had become a close friend. That kind of slow, patient accumulation is the entire wakelee story.
The band formed in Brooklyn in 2019, when guitarist and vocalist Alex Bulmer, his identical twin brother and drummer David Bulmer, and bassist Elliot Shiang were all in their early 20s. The name came from Wakelee Field in Demarest, New Jersey, a park the Bulmer twins frequented as children. Their shared references stretched from Macseal and A Great Big Pile of Leaves through to Pinegrove, Alex G, Mac DeMarco, beabadoobee and Modest Mouse: the full breadth of indie rock and emo that had accumulated through the 2000s and 2010s. A self-titled debut album followed in 2023, four years after the three first met.
New York’s Garage-Rock Mirror and What Wakelee Found Instead
Playing locally was, for a time, a dispiriting experience. ‘We for a while were playing shows in New York, hoping that we would find similar bands or bands that we really connected with, but there just wasn’t much emo in the scene,’ Alex says. His characterisation of what was there is pointed: ‘very garage rocky or '70s revival, a lot of leather jackets. Trying to revive the Strokes era time and time again.’ Nothing wrong with it, he concedes, but it was not theirs. ‘There wasn’t much of a community aspect that we felt.’
The pivot came with the 2024 single ‘Criminal’, produced by Zach Aumueller, who has worked with the band ever since. It was cleaner and tighter than anything before it, it had trumpets, and it gave wakelee a clearer sense of what they were trying to be. A new internal rule followed: ‘In order for us to release a song, we all have to be excited about it,’ Alex says. ‘Whereas before, we would all settle a lot more.’
That discipline carried through to the Doghouse EP, also produced by Aumueller and released in February 2025. The band booked their first DIY tour around it and made music videos for all five of its tracks, rolling them out from August 2024 through August 2025. Attention gathered: Hot Mulligan’s Chris Freeman and booking agent Jason Parent took notice, and wakelee found themselves opening for Arm’s Length, then Oakwood, then Somos, then Young Culture, then Free Throw, all within roughly 11 months.
Wakelee Under Construction Forever and the Wax Bodega Signing
The label question arrived as the band were finishing what would become Under Construction Forever, begun in early 2025. They were approached by Wax Bodega, the record label imprint of Many Hats, the distribution company run by Fred Feldman, founder of Triple Crown Records, and Zack Zarillo, founder of Property of Zack and co-founder of Bad Timing Records. According to Billboard, Many Hats was started in 2020 and has paid $50 million to artists since its founding, a figure that speaks to the scale of what Feldman and Zarillo have built in a short time.
Signing to Wax Bodega would make wakelee labelmates with Hot Mulligan, Free Throw, Saturdays At Your Place and others. Free Throw’s endorsement was decisive. ‘They were just like, “My god, you gotta sign with them,”‘ Elliot recalls. ‘”They’re so cool. They get shit done.”‘ The artist-ownership angle mattered too. Every band on the tour that included Free Throw, Macseal and TRSH, Alex explains, ‘really stood behind owning their own music, and how important that is. That definitely flipped the switch for us.’ Wax Bodega’s deal terms were, in Alex’s words, ‘as artist friendly as it gets.’ The other draw was the label’s active, current roster. ‘You look at their site and it looks like a museum,’ he says of certain unnamed alternatives. Wax Bodega, by contrast, ‘do a good job of developing artists and growing artists, instead of just working with a couple super established legacy bands.’
Under Construction Forever, produced once again by Aumueller with additional production from Chris Freeman, is the most energetic and pop punk-oriented release wakelee have made. The increased touring shaped it directly: songs needed to be fun to play night after night, something earlier material had not always been. ‘I was dreading some songs like, fuck, I gotta play this one?’ Elliot says of the old catalogue. The new record opens with Alex bringing his voice to a scream on ‘Sundial’. Lead single ‘Joyce Kilmer Service Area’ introduces a double-time D-beat into the band’s sound for the first time. Brief diversions into acoustic music (‘See It Now’) and experimental electronics (‘080808’) sit alongside the louder material without disrupting the album’s momentum.
Lyrically, the record deals with what Alex calls ‘communication breakdown’: things left unsaid, relationships corroded by time and neglect. He is candid about the emotional core of the writing. ‘One of my parents has been an alcoholic and drug abuser for basically my entire life,’ he says. The album becomes, in part, a reckoning with that relationship from multiple angles: anger, regret, a gradual recognition of who that person really is. The confusion and frustration land clearly in the music without ever tipping into self-pity.
Hot Mulligan have recruited wakelee for their upcoming autumn tour alongside One Step Closer and Riley!, whose new To Live and Die in the American South EP features guest vocals from Hot Mulligan’s Tades Sanville. For Elliot, the generosity runs deep: ‘They definitely pay it forward, which is sick. And it’s inspiring for us ’cause if we ever get to a level close to that, we’re gonna hopefully do that naturally too.’ The band’s next priority, both Alex and Elliot say with some urgency, is finishing album three. ‘We’re 30 now,’ Elliot notes, ‘so we just gotta get shit done as soon as we can.’
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