Dancing to the Pulse of Absence with Wants
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Wants @ Dickens.
Beneath the surface of pulsing synths and echo-drenched melodies lies a lyrical world steeped in isolation, disillusionment, and the quiet collapse of certainty. There’s no posturing here, no escape hatch—just a stark, surreal mirror held up to the fractured interior of our modern lives. This is where the music of Wants—a darkwave/ post-punk duo from Calgary—lives.
The duo, made up of Jeebs Nabil (vocals, guitar, synths, production) and Tom White (bass), was formed after Nabil’s old band, Melted Mirror, dissolved just before COVID hit. Nabil wanted to continue making music in the darkwave realm and began crafting demos, spending countless hours learning how to create drum machine beats and produce on the fly.
“It was kind of a scary choice for me just because I was the guitar player in Melted Mirror, so I kind of stepped into doing everything with guitars, vocals, producing and doing the synths,” Nabil says. “But I had people encouraging me to keep going.”
One of those people was White. Nabil had been sharing the progress of the demos with him during the COVID pandemic. “I basically bugged him to be in the project, and then hopped on bass to add a bit more depth to the tracks,” White says.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Wants @ Dickens.
Together, they eventually released the Wants (EP) in 2023, and Nabil is currently mixing the album, which will be called In Plain Sight, slated for release sometime in October. Nabil says the eight-track album will continue the opaque themes of isolation and detachment.
“The album is named after one of the tracks,” Nabil says. “I picked that because it’s very indicative of you feeling emotionally disconnected from people, even though you're physically around each other, but you don't see each other. The record is all about that.”
There’s also a feeling of absence in Wants’ music. The character perspective Nabil sings from seems to be searching for some entity or feeling that is usually missing, sometimes signalled by a blaring guitar, motorik drum sample, hypnotic synths, or deep bass riff.
The music also has trickles of EDM, industrial, and techno scattered throughout. Nabil will cut some of those samples together with a beat, then add guitars, vocals, and bass, and it becomes a Wants song. “I love industrial samples, especially for percussive samples, and maybe a little bit of drone there too. With the music I really lean into, I like the beats to be kind of heavy, and I've learned over time that what makes a song really pop is the percussion.”
The recurring theme of disconnection that defines darker genres like darkwave is powerfully reflected in Nabil's real-life experiences and surges through Wants' music. “I just hope I make the lyrics generic enough for people to take their own emotional meaning from them,” he says. “I’m not a fan of contrived lyrics that need to sound goth, like let's go make up some creepy lyrics about bleeding in a church or something.”
“I think people can tell, especially in this genre, whether or not you sound genuine,” White says to sum up the point. “Like it’s dark music, but there’s a reason for it.”
Though Wants isn’t all doom and gloom. Ultimately, both Nabil and White are trying to make dark music that you can dance to. “We want people to have a good time,” White says. “It’s all about that feeling when a new track seems to land on a crowd,” Nabil says. “We really get into it, and when I see them dancing and moving, it really fills my cup.”
Wants will play Terminus: Modulation in Calgary on Friday July 25. Extremely limited amounts of day passes and individual tickets are available on the Terminus Festival website.