Kid Wave

Kid Wave started in 2013 as the project of Swedish singer-songwriter Lea Emmery, who had left Norrköping for the UK in 2011 and spent her first couple of years there working out a lush, summery, shoegaze-influenced sound and posting early tracks to Bandcamp under the Kid Wave name. The band came together slowly. First was guitarist Mattias Bhatt, an old friend and fellow Swedish expat, then Serra Petale, an Australian teaching drums at the same music school where Emmery studied, and finally British bassist Harry Deacon, which rounded the London quartet out. They signed to the London indie label Heavenly Recordings, which released their debut EP, Gloom, in 2014. Its four songs took in harmonic power pop, '90s-leaning indie and melodic shoegaze, and the full-length Wonderlust followed a year later. In 2016 Emmery relocated to the U.S. with a new batch of songs and built a revamped Kid Wave in Los Angeles with local musicians. A new single arrived in February 2017, and the band spent that spring touring the States with The Shins.