Harry Permezel

Harry Permezel learned guitar young, with an older brother’s influence behind him, and began working out his sound at his parents’ house in Melbourne. He unearthed a set of his dad’s old speakers in the garage and slowly built a home studio around them, and that is where he recorded and produced his self-titled debut, released in 2016 by Muscle Beach Records, a label based in Oxford, Mississippi. Over the next two years he and Muscle Beach stayed in close contact and built a tight friendship and creative bond, a deeply personal relationship between artist and label. Wax Man, the second album from the Melbourne native, is an intimate reflection on a twenty-something’s formative era of self-discovery. Its ten tracks flutter from introspective observance to guided narration on the forming and failing of relationships, on uncertainty about the future and on hope for it, and the warm production lights those themes with haunting harmonies, head-bobbing hooks, clockwork percussion, sporadic flecks of synthesizer and crooning rumination.