I See Stars - THE WHEEL
I See Stars
THE WEEL
Release Date: September 12th, 2025
Label: Sumerian Records
THE WHEEL, the sixth full-length album from I See Stars, is an album about grief. It was written during times of uncertainty, chaos, and mourning. It is what I would rank as the darkest record from I See Stars, but I wouldn’t say that choice wasn’t intentional, rather circumstantial. Ideas for the record began during the COVID pandemic, when we had “all the time in the world” to create and isolate, but somewhere along the way, members Devin and Andrew Oliver lost their uncle to pancreatic cancer, and Devin landed in the hospital for months on end dealing with a painful condition called intracranial hypertension.
There is a lot of pain throughout the fourteen tracks that make up THE WHEEL, and it can make it a hard listen at times. These are not the same bouncy scene kids who hit the road at the age of fifteen singing songs like “The End of the World Party” and “3-D”, vocals slathered with autotune in between guttural screams and breakdowns. I See Stars have experienced profound hardship here, and it can be heard all throughout THE WHEEL, whether in the reverb-covered downtuned guitars that wrap themselves around the ear canals like a blanket smothering the fires of a panic attack, or in the vocal choices made by Devin Oliver. He hits some high notes here, but keeps his voice in the lower register, in some places hidden behind effects processing, his delivery almost more like a drone, like its painful to revisit some of these memories.
There are moments where it’s hard to listen to THE WHEEL, not because it’s a bad album, but because you can feel the pain. There are some singles on this album that were previously released (“Anomaly”, “Drift”, “are we 3ven”, “D4MAGE DONE”, and “SPLIT), yet they’re all appropriately placed on the album track listing, not just bunched together as the previously released songs. Even though the writing of THE WHEEL was left up to fate (the band would use a “wheel” application each day they were in the studio to randomly pick which songs they would work on that given day), the structure of the album feels very intentional. It’s dark, dreamlike at times, and emotionally heavy.
In the album’s closing track, “Curtain Call”, amidst an electronica-metal-infused conclusion, Oliver’s voice decays into the distance with lines like “When the lights go out, and the curtains drawn/And the letters come down from the marquee/Will you ever love/Will you ever love me?” The band once singing sci-fi-inspired songs about “The End of the World Party” has now found itself contemplating what happens when the party’s over. How can you not in a world like this?
