Wavves and Say Anything meet in claymation for "Deathx1k" — a slacker-rock crossover that lands softly

On 8 July 2026, Pitchfork published a news item confirming a release that had been circling the indie-rock internet for weeks: Wavves' Nathan Williams and Say Anything's Max Bemis had finished a full collaborative album under the title Cherry Soda. The first single, "Deathx1k," arrived the same day with a claymation video — the kind of low-budget, hand-shaped visual gag that signals, before a single note plays, that the project is not in a hurry to be taken seriously.

The collaboration reads less as a reinvention than as a vent. Both Williams and Bemis have spent the past five years detoxing from the public noise that once surrounded them: Williams from the early-decade Wavves backlash cycle and his own well-documented struggles with sobriety, Bemis from the post-2015 drift of Say Anything, the band that broke him to a mainstream audience and then seemed to slip its leash. Cherry Soda is positioned, deliberately, as two scene veterans doing something they don't have to do.

What's actually on the record

Pitchfork's write-up frames Cherry Soda as a short, pop-leaning project — closer in spirit to the kind of joint album a pair of mutual fans might make in a friend's garage than to a label-mandated "event" record. The claymation treatment for "Deathx1k" is the tell. Stop-motion of the kind Williams has flirted with since the King of the Beach era, paired with Bemis's throat-loose lyric delivery, lands as a deliberate aesthetic choice: cheap, tactile, slightly absurd.

The collaboration also functions as a gentle thumb in the eye of the modern album-rollout machine. There is no leaked rollout controversy, no cryptic website, no radio promo cycle. Two bands that built their audiences in the early 2010s release a thing on a Wednesday morning with a short film of clay figures. That posture — restraint as statement — is, in its own small way, the point.

A counter-narrative worth holding

It is fair to ask whether Cherry Soda is anything more than a mutual-fan exercise monetised into a release. The Pitchfork item is short on specifics: no track list is published beyond the single, no tour is attached, no label is named on the record's front, and there is no commentary from either artist about what the record is for. That absence could be read two ways. The optimistic reading is that it speaks to the music doing the work. The cynical reading, familiar to anyone who has watched veteran indie acts move into late-period side projects, is that Cherry Soda exists because both artists have a small core audience that will buy whatever they ship under these names regardless of substance.

Both reads are probably partially correct. The honest position is closer to: this is two songwriters with long arcs behind them releasing something low-stakes, having clearly decided that "low-stakes" is preferable to forcing another proper record and watching the discourse chew it up. The music press has spent a decade treating every veteran release as either a comeback or a betrayal; Cherry Soda opts out of that binary.

What the visual choice tells us

Claymation has had a slow-burn revival in indie music video work over the past two years, mostly as a counterweight to the high-gloss, AI-assisted aesthetic that has come to dominate mid-budget music video production. A handmade stop-motion treatment communicates something specific: that the song is the object, that the video is meant to be looked at once or twice and discarded, and that no one is trying to manufacture a viral moment. Williams, who has experimented with stop-motion across several Wavves video cycles, is on familiar ground here. Bemis, by contrast, has leaned more on collage and live-action in his Say Anything output; the clay figures may be his concession to the project's house style.

The decision also tells you who this record is not for. There is no headline-friendly visual hook. There is no controversy staged. There is no algorithmic jackpot being chased. That is a deliberate narrowing of the audience to a niche that has followed both artists for fifteen years and is happy to be spoken to plainly.

What's unresolved

Neither the Pitchfork item nor the band's own social channels published by 8 July 2026 specify label backing, track length, tour plans, or whether Cherry Soda is a one-off or the start of a longer working relationship. There is also no verified interview yet with either Williams or Bemis articulating what the project means to them — only third-party enthusiasm. The gap matters less than it would for a major release; for a record built around low expectations, it is, for now, part of the design.

Stakes, briefly

The record's actual stakes are small, and that is its wager. Cherry Soda will not move the cultural needle. What it can do is remind the indie-rock audience that long-running artists are allowed to make records that feel like favours to themselves. In a market saturated with comeback narratives and opinion-cycle bait, the gesture is not nothing.

The Monexus culture desk wrote this as a short-notice release note, not a primer. The source material available on 8 July 2026 was a single news write-up and the accompanying video; the desk flagged at filing time that tracklist, label, and artist-side commentary remain unpublished.