Computerwife – Hammered

On Friday, Computerwife (the project of NYC musician Addie Warncke), will release a new LP entitled Born From A Wish via Danger Collective.

The first release since her 2023 self-titled LP, the album arrives following a period of hibernation for the project that ended with a July tour with Feeble Little Horse and the release of the single “Nobody,” that Stereogum described as “a piece of fuzzy, riffy alt-rock that deconstructs and reconstructs ’90s alt-rock sounds, reflecting the aesthetics of a couple of different generations.” Computerwife has subsequently shared the singles “Foreverrr,” and “You Didn’t Know,” and today she is sharing a final preview of the album, a track called “Hammered.”

Warncke says of the track:

 “I made this in 2023. The song was originally self-deprecating towards my own confusion in life and then changed when I noticed some people around me starting to shift their personalities to fit into different social environments. It really annoyed and disappointed me, probably because I felt so lost myself. It’s not something you can really address outwardly so it ended up all becoming one song instead.”

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Warncke started making music as a teenager after hearing Grimes break down the making of “Kill v. Maim” on Song Exploder and downloading a free trial of Ableton to follow her process. In 2018, she moved to New York to study at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, uploading her first songs as Computerwife to SoundCloud during her freshman year and later gathering five favourites for the Computerwife EP at the start of COVID lockdowns.

Over the next few years, Warncke continued writing and recording, though she deleted her entire stock of demos in a moment of personal crisis. When she signed with Los Angeles independent label Danger Collective, she had to dig through emails, folders, and digital ephemera to see what could be recovered. A Google Drive of songs she had sent to an ex-boyfriend became Computerwife, released in 2023, an album of fuzzy shoegaze, slacker rock, late-’90s haze, and big feelings played into a little microphone.

Her new album came together in the background in the immediate aftermath of Computerwife, comprising snippets of Warncke’s life in Atlanta and New York during a transitional period. She traveled back to Atlanta when pandemic lockdowns made in-person school unfeasible. She remembers that interlude on “Foreverr,” a dreamy pop song about a night spent snorting vyvanse and smoking cigarettes behind her old high school.

By the time she had thirty songs recorded, she knew she didn’t want them to “all fade into the distance.” She sat down with her friends Victoria Winter and Ethan Williams of the Brooklyn indie band shower curtain, in Winter’s bedroom, and played every demo for them back to back. She asked Winter and Williams to note down those they were most excited by, and, without pushing back, agreed to turn them into an album.

Williams produced the album. It marked the first time Warcke had spent time reworking recordings in a studio, and it sounds more deliberately arranged than her past work as a result. Largely gone are the punkish spasms and minimal 8-bit electronics of that first EP, and the disconcerting, doom-laden atmosphere of the self-titled LP. Born From a Wish is more direct, an indie-rock record that might borrow from college-radio records of the past but finds its own, more direct, more melodic approach to shoegaze and guitar pop. Though computer-generated beats still poke through the mix occasionally, like relics from the writing process, this is fundamentally a rock record with shape and body—even if the echo and reverb leave the guitars in a more liminal space.

But having rediscovered her process, she was already moving past the songs on Born From a Wish. By the time she listened back to the album for the last time—a full year ago, when she approved the final mix—they felt practically foreign. “I can hear all these different thoughts I had in little moments. It feels like small pieces of what I was going through. I sound so much younger, and definitely more lost.”

Warncke has another album ready to go on her computer, one she says feels closer to who she is now. But while she hasn’t listened to Born From a Wish herself in over a year, the record has already changed the way she approaches music. What began as an exercise in studying other people’s songs became a way of testing the distance between reality and the world she wanted to inhabit. Like the lump of clay she kept beneath her computer during Zoom classes, the album took shape almost incidentally in her hands: something imagined slowly becoming physical.

#addiiiiiiiiie