Dari Bay - Surprise Wish
NOTE: This is a pre-order, orders will ship on or before the week of June 22nd.
Dari Bay has already been many things. Since first launching the band, Zachary James and his friends have used Dari Bay to explore free-for-all experimentation, shape-shifting from project to project before slowly cohering into a vehicle for James’ most direct and personal songwriting. The pivot became clear on 2023’s Longest Day Of The Year, a rangey songwriting exercise that served as Dari Bay’s proper debut. Now, the evolution has blossomed on Surprise Wish, Dari Bay’s sophomore outing and first for Double Double Whammy. Though these nine songs may sound like the work of an assured craftsman, they also emerge from an era of transition, when James puzzled over what he wanted his life to look like, and what Dari Bay would become.
Growing up in a musical family based in Brattleboro, Vermont, James tried his hand at everything: learning drums as a child, DJ’ing, rap beats, production, elementary school punk rock. “Vermont is small, so it can take time to create a scene with a strong identity,” James recalls. But he eventually became a multi-faceted and in-demand player: providing drums on recordings and tours for old friends Lily Seabird and Greg Freeman, serving as one of the primary songwriters in Robber Robber, joining Unknown Mortal Orchestra as a full-time member, all while steadily concocting Dari Bay’s next chapter.
Surprise Wish came together slowly over time as James balanced multiple projects while finishing college, but everything about these songs was immediate. Seeking to abandon the genre detours of past Dari Bay releases, James honed in on a scuzzy, visceral rock sound. “I cared less about aesthetics and more about primal feelings,” he explains. For each song, James harnessed moments of sudden, unpredictable inspiration — ideas that struck him then wouldn’t leave him alone. As before, James made much of Surprise Wish alone without real studio time, giving the whole album a raw, homespun quality anchoring lyrics that are intimate yet casual and self-effacing.
Across Surprise Wish, James tackles the joys and pitfalls of a life formed by and filtered through the internet, isolation, connection, near-disasters, fragile hope, all in a series of snapshots of the strange liminal space that is young adulthood. As he hit his early twenties, James was thinking about all the things he believed about himself that were being proven wrong and realizing he had no idea about how the world really was. “There’s a lot of pressure to act like you know exactly what’s going on and be smart all of the time,” he explains. “A lot of the record is like, ‘Fuck that.’”
Released in summer 2025, “The Joke” was an early opening salvo, chosen because it was so different from Dari Bay’s past work. “We wanted to set ourselves up for anything to be possible,” James says. A chugging rocker asking if its narrator is “in on the joke,” it set the stage for the rest of the album. Driven by distorted guitars and James’ vocals — sometimes dreamy, sometimes murmured, always conversational — Surprise Wish finds Dari Bay blending strains of ‘90s alt-rock, indie, and grunge into songs that are economic, catchy, and equal parts sly and poignant. In James’ hands, the combination throws sharp contrasts together. Bleary bedroom pop melodies capture the listless, searching days of your twenties, but punchy arrangements and performances act like the little eurekas James experienced, urgently jolting you awake.
“Chevy” is a character study about control freaking your way to loneliness, riding a constricting guitar figure until an instrumental outro echoes the narrator’s walled-in solitude. Meanwhile, “On Your Side” lopes its way into a tongue-in-cheek “touch grass” reality check; floaty then twangy, it plays out like a plainspoken crash landing back to earth. Fueled by layers of guitar beautiful yet overdriven, “We’re Gonna Be Okay” reflects on a fire that nearly took James’ home and sounds as much like a conflagration itself as the sunrise following a close call.
James’ only promise for the future of Dari Bay is that he will always be making albums, and that they will always capture him simply figuring out how to write and record music. Fittingly for a project that is always coming into being, Surprise Wish is a portrait of a person coming into being. These are songs in transit, but inviting the listener to cut through the fog and be more present in their moment.