For their newest single and B-side, Gainesville indie rockers Driptones are taking things seaside.
The latest efforts from the four piece, composed of guitarist, keyboardist and vocalist Xander Boggs, bassist and vocalist Zach Gerbi, lead guitarist Collin Fitzgerald and drummer Tripp Jones, serve as two sunny reflections of beach days gone by. The single, “Wave Sounds,” and accompanying B-side, “Sun Sick,” are set to release Dec. 18.
Both songs were inspired by the band’s adolescence in Cocoa Beach and West Palm Beach, where summer afternoons were spent surfing and frequenting local beaches. With “Wave Sounds,” Boggs drew from his high school experiences for the majority of the writing.
“It’s kind of just reflecting on that now and acknowledging that that time in my life is somewhat over,” he said.
“Sun Sick” takes a more somber approach. The group wrote it through the same lens of reflection as “Wave Sounds,” but the track has a greater focus on the idea of reminiscence itself – a concept Jones dubbed as “warm nostalgia.”
“It sort of personifies the longing for those times,” Gerbi said
These will be the group’s first releases since August’s “Nicotine” and third and fourth overall, adding to “Nicotine” and “Give & Take,” their first ever single released almost exactly a year ago.
Fitzgerald said the two songs work in tandem, “Wave Sounds” as the more upbeat representation of good times on the water and “Sun Sick” as the moments when the light starts to fade and the day comes to a close.
“By the end, it starts to change moods a little bit,” Fitzgerald said.
The elements of nostalgia were made even more prominent for the band through the pandemic. The songs were products of Gerbi and Boggs simply looking for things to write about in their free time, pulling from the past and tackling emotions left previously unresolved.
Instrumentally, the tracks continue with Driptones’ indie-alternative sound, characterized by bright guitars, smooth basslines and easy backbeat grooves.
Though the group often crosses genre lines, they take inspiration from not only their garage rock influences, but also each other. “Wave Sounds” and “Sun Sick” were collaborative efforts, ones that saw the group taking their individual innovations and crafting them into complete compositions.
“Both of these songs are kind of in two sections and they were all separate ideas that we had, and then we kind of ended up just combining them and it worked out,” Boggs said.
Though their streaming catalog is sparse, the band said they have a host of material in store. In addition to a collection of socially distant live shows lined up for early next year, the band is gearing up to release batches of singles in the coming months.
A larger project may be in the cards for the future, but for now, Driptones is putting their energy into exposure on a smaller scale.
“I think we need to just focus on getting more music out there,” Fitzgerald said.
Contact Heather at hbushman@alligator.org. Follow her on Twitter @hgrizzl.
Heather Bushman is a fourth-year journalism and political science student and the enterprise elections reporter. She previously wrote and edited for the Avenue desk and reported for WUFT News. You can usually find her writing, listening to music or writing about listening to music. Ask her about synesthesia or her album tier list sometime.
