If you’ve spent any time on the internet lately, you’ve probably come across the kind of music that feels like it was grown in a lab: perfectly inoffensive, lightly vibey, and engineered for Spotify’s “Chill Mornings” playlist. It washes over you, frictionless and forgettable, like sonic beige paint. So imagine my surprise of stumbling onto Breathing Under Water, the debut album from Start Forward (a.k.a. Miami-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Joshua Sturtevant) which is bafflingly, not at all that.
Instead, it’s the kind of album you’d expect from someone who’s spent over a decade not releasing music, quietly stewing in existential dread and guitar pedals. What begins as a modest personal project ends up sounding like a small act of defiance: an album that doesn’t try to chase whatever genre TikTok decided was cool this week, but instead digs into the surprisingly radical act of just… feeling things. Deeply. Awkwardly. Messily. Breathing Under Water isn’t a “comeback album” in the traditional sense. It’s more like the sonic equivalent of waking up in your mid-30s, realizing your life is a weird collage of unresolved feelings and bad coping strategies, and deciding to make a record about it.
The album opens with its title track, a 2.5-minute instrumental piece that doesn’t so much announce itself as tiptoe in like it’s unsure if you’re home. It’s moody, pretty, and oddly disarming; a bit like if Explosions in the Sky moved to Florida and started journaling. Then, just as you’re settling in, the record pivots into “Glorious” and “Another Late Night,” tracks that harken back to the golden age of ’90s alt-rock, which is to say: guitars are back, baby, and they’re slightly sad but trying their best. Think something in the ballpark of something like Siamese Dream, but if it grew up, got a job, and started seeing a therapist.
Throughout the album, there’s a push and pull between control and collapse. Songs like “Tightrope” and “Rapture of the Deep” shift the album into wild driections. “Tightrope” plays like a Killers-style drama rock bop; full of sweeping urgency, tightly wound with chugging guitars and driving percussion that feels like it’s barreling toward something epic. Then there’s “Rapture of the Deep,” which trades that glossy build-up for something stranger and more fragmented; closer to what Matmos might assemble from broken machines and submerged field recordings. It’s twitchy and textural, built on off-kilter rhythms and sonic detritus that feels sculpted rather than performed. And when things dramatically crescendo, as they do on “Next Time,” the emotional weight doesn’t drop so much as settle in all throughout its instrumental runtime. It’s not melodrama; it’s vulnerability with callouses.
Here’s the thing: this album is a solo effort in the most literal sense. Every instrument, every layer, every production choice, Sturtevant did it himself. And while that kind of control can sometimes lead to creative navel-gazing, what we get here is something else: a record that feels deeply lived-in, like it was built slowly by someone who needed to make it whether or not anyone ever heard it. There’s no sheen of “content.” No sense that it’s trying to slot neatly into some festival lineup or brand partnership. It’s raw, sure, but not messy. More like a diary entry that accidentally turned into an album.
The production leans into warmth and texture. Nothing is over-polished or compressed into oblivion. You can hear the room. You can feel the human behind the sounds. Breathing Under Water sounds refreshingly, stubbornly analog; flawed, thoughtful, sincere. And that’s the strange magic of it. By the time the final track, “Next Time (Kaiya Reprise),” loops back to the album’s emotional core, it doesn’t feel like a neat bow so much as a deep breath after a long conversation. Rather it offers something even rarer: acceptance. It’s not triumphant or grandiose; there’s no big, cathartic climax. Instead, it lands with the softness of someone finally saying what they needed to say, not for applause, but to hear it out loud. The reprise doesn’t attempt to rewrite the earlier version of the song, nor does it try to correct it; it simply sees it again, with clearer eyes and maybe a little more grace.
That’s what gives the album its resonance; not just the emotional weight of its content, but its refusal to pretend that clarity equals closure. Things are still messy. The story’s still unfolding. But now there’s forward motion, a pulse, a sense that even in the absence of answers, the act of continuing matters. It’s not about having solved anything; it’s about choosing to keep going anyway.
In short: Breathing Under Water by Start Forward is a quiet rebuttal to the idea that everything needs to be fast, shiny, or viral to be worthwhile. It’s an album that resists the urge to shout over the noise by instead speaking clearly about what it means to keep going when you’re not entirely sure how. And if that’s not punk in its own way, I don’t know what is.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
