There’s a cascade of moments at the end of “Strangers” – the single that leads off Work Wife’s new EP Waste Management – that marks a change for the Brooklyn folk-rock project. Chief songwriter Meredith Lampe’s downcast rumination on loneliness in the U.S.’ most populous city trails off into near-silence, only to return cast into harmony with a raucous chorus of voices singing with her in kind – affirming her story as a solitary experience shared in infinite parallel. The band responds by wringing out their final bars for all they’re worth, decelerating the song ‘til they close it with a comic wink. The post-take laughter and “that was perfect” chatter is left in, the joy in the room palpable. Lampe may be disillusioned, sure, but she’s no longer alone.

Conceived as a companion piece to 2022’s EP Quitting Season, Waste Management is a confident set of strides into a new era for Work Wife, seeing singer-guitarist Lampe now joined by comrades Kenny Monroe (bass/vocals), Cody Edgerly (drums), and brand-new member Isaac Stalling (lead guitar). It’s a warm reply to its older sibling, complete with a direct visual callback to the snow-immobilized truck featured on the former’s cover. On Waste Management, the same truck now features as a symbol of possibility: hood ajar, surrounded by flora in bloom, and attended to by two figures – one of which is Monroe’s father – making good on the thaw, readying the vehicle to roll. It’s a fitting poetic language for the grounded, wryly humorous perspective with which Lampe newly addresses her now-signature themes of anxiety, relationship dynamics, and religious disentanglement – that there’s life beyond the patterns we feel frozen into, even if that life just means the potential to drive away.

After relocating from her native Seattle in 2017, Lampe was initially connected to New York’s music scene via Brooklyn surf-pop outfit Colatura, whose clever drummer-recruitment strategy involved combing through the clients of local instructors in hopes of finding willing applicants among their students. While the band passed over Lampe’s eventual tryout as a drummer, her chemistry with the group prompted them to create a new position for her on keys and guitar. Lampe, a lifelong classical musician without formal experience in a rock band, took quickly to her new context – the band provided a perfect crash course in DIY, allowing Lampe to grasp the mechanics of writing and recording, booking shows, and enmeshing herself within the city’s vibrant music community. The band also supplied her with a pivotal moment: the first intoxicating contact with the high of performing her own songs with the backing of a full band.

When an assignment to write for Colatura’s full-length met with a pandemic-era decamping to her Washington home, Lampe soon found herself generating material she deemed too personal for her prior band’s shared-songwriting format. Work Wife’s initial bedroom-recorded singles soon followed in 2021, and Lampe returned to New York with a calling card that felt representative of her own taste and vision. While searching for personnel to make her first studio recordings, Lampe met Dan Alvarez and Jordan Dunn-Pilz, the musicians and producers behind the beloved indie rock band TOLEDO. Together Lampe and her collaborators brought Work Wife into a lush, full-color adaptation on Quitting Season, coming full circle with mixes helmed by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte. The project became a band in earnest after recording, earning the support of Born Losers Records, racking up tour dates, and carving out a live performance shot through with new members’ communal energy.

That communal energy was largely informative during Lampe’s writing towards the follow-up. Waste Management “was the first time that I’d been writing with the purpose of making songs fun to play in a live setting,” she says. “I was trying to think about how we could work in more moments of breathing, more moments we can just enjoy playing the song.” Dialoguing with expanded musical margins – again captured in stunning detail by Alvarez, Dunn-Pilz, and Duterte – only allows for Lampe’s narratives to bloom into new palettes on Waste Management, such as the soaring key change that tears through the back half of “Something’s Up,” infusing the song’s view of the cyclical tropes of visiting family with a sepia-toned tenderness, rendering the song’s import to one of gratefulness for having loved ones to go through the same scripts with at all. Or take the propulsive, hypnotic “Control,” in which Lampe interrupts a bookending of repeated, spiraling phrases with a lucid core – a compositional decision arrived at by intense collaboration, as was the case with the satisfying jump to motorik double-speed in the tightly coiled “Downtime.” Elsewhere, the band conjures West Coast beauty as the backdrop to a love song on “Coeur d’Alene” and deftly backs up Lampe’s lyrical penchant for bottling nuance on closer “Soft Lie.” That song, too, ends with a comic wink – a resolving high note plunked out on a keyboard after a dramatically sustained ending. There’s no laughter kept on the tape this time – but by this point, you already know it’s there.

- Caleb Cordes