In addition to past work in bands Speedy Ortiz and Grass is Green, Devin McKnight has long written his own music as Maneka, releasing his solo debut Is You Is in 2017. On 2022’s Dark Matters, McKnight set out to explore the full range of his experiences as a studio and touring musician, delivering a striking, unclassifiable mesh of genre influence through which McKnight deftly explored the anxieties of working as a Black man in majority white indie rock spaces.
On his 2025 follow-up, bathes and listens, McKnight focuses his vision on Maneka’s musical identity, resulting in a more grounded album that still tests the extremes of McKnight’s songwriting talent. Elements of shoegaze and slowcore are prominent, but engineer Alex Farrar's exceptional production (Wednesday, Snail Mail, MJ Lenderman) makes bathes and listens cohesive, yet still distinct from any one style.
Maneka opens bathes and listens with a Pinback reminiscent verse on “shallowing,” alternating with heavy choruses before exploding with alarm-call guitar in the song’s crashing coda. “shallowing’s” huge ending sets up “dimelo,” McKnight’s crunched, faceripping ode to Carmelo Anthony (specifically Hoodie Melo). “dimelo” is urgent and instantly enthralling, completely swarmed by distortion, with only faint squeals passing through its shroud.
Such extremes are a fixture of McKnight’s songwriting on bathes and listens, and provide him a space to interact with his vulnerability — as on the album’s middlepoint “pony,” a softer moment of acoustic reflection that retraces McKnight’s days in high school football, picking apart what it meant to be an outsider in a world where coaches put unreasonable all-world expectations on seventeen year-olds. Singles “yung yeller” and “throwing ax” are similarly introspective, the latter describing the necessity of acceptance over denial before tumbling into a restrained, anfractuous guitar solo.
The album’s ambitious denouement, “5225,” is a slowburning build around knotted guitar, steadily crescendoing to a moment of chaotic clarity that centers a boisterous, unexpected solo. “5225” momentarily steers bathes and listens away from its sonic milieu, only to plunge listeners back into the heavy, crunched distortion of the album’s closer “why i play 2k/land back,” concluding on a note that reminds us the land we call ours and pass on through legacy is all stolen. It’s declarative in a way that matches the stylistically focused nature of bathes and listens, the product of McKnight’s choice to allow his strengths to guide his songwriting, resulting in Maneka’s strongest work to date.
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