Something fated shines through in the way Magic Wands move, as if they’ve been orbiting this precise sound since the first time they struck a chord. Chris and Dexy Valentine have built a world from vapour and voltage, where guitars glow like cathedral glass and synths breathe with human warmth. Their new album, Cascades, isn’t a collection of songs so much as a place where time folds in on itself; 4AD romance refracted through the soft static of midnight radio. They write like people who believe memory isn’t linear but tidal, forever returning with new debris, new beauty.
“Cascades was born from a fascination with how the past lingers inside us and explores transformation and the spaces where timelines blur into one,” the band explain.
The record opens with Across The Water, where bright synths glisten with the morning after a storm. The vocals float just above, half in the waking world, half in a lucid dream. It feels like waking from a delicious mid-afternoon nap: hazy, replenished, faintly unreal. Armour ripples next, moving with the poise of a river learning its own path. A shield, a confession, a spell against the world. Here, Magic Wands uncover their own mythology: the paradox of protection and surrender that defines love, art, and self.
On Hide, the drums strike like footsteps in an empty hall, grounding a guitar that glows and trembles in equal measure. The hush of Dexy’s voice builds to something grand, the kind of crescendo that feels accidental; as if emotion itself has outgrown its vessel. Then Albatross drifts into view, slower, heavier, a song that sinks and sways under its own mystery. There’s a strange grace in its exhaustion, the sense of carrying too many skies on one’s back. Moonshadow is made for late-night movement, its gothic pulse and call-and-response vocals conjure a candlelit dance floor. Even in its gloom, a bright light cuts through: a chorus that gleams like stained glass under strobes.
Time To Dream turns inward again, echoing and strange, like being trapped in your subconscious yet deciding to stay awhile. You wander, curious, as the melodies curve and overlap in hypnotic geometry. The title track, Cascades, feels darker, colder…more subterranean. There’s something of Octavian Winters in its spectral drift, a sense that the song exists in the seam between sleep and afterlife. Golden shivers with Siouxsie-esque elegance, all eerie guitars and candlelit intensity. It’s one of the album’s most magnetic moments, a song that seems to breathe on its own. By the time Room With A View arrives, the spell is complete. The track channels the baroque grandeur of Strange Boutique and Faith and the Muse, with vocals that rise like smoke from an altar.
Finally, Riverbed closes the record in a hush. A slow, hypnotic drift through beautiful synths and half-remembered dreams…a gentle slipping beneath the surface.
Magic Wands have distilled something rare and luminous here, a chemistry of past and future that hums with its own quiet electricity floating in its own moment, a mirror reflecting both the ancient and the electronic, the body and the beyond.
Listen to Cascades below and order the album, out now via Metropolis Records, here,
Over the years, the duo have become fixtures of a certain twilight circuit, sharing stages with Radiohead, Slowdive, The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Breeders, The Horrors, Dinosaur Jr., Deerhunter, and Mac DeMarco. Their performances, whether beneath festival lights at Lollapalooza, SXSW, Noise Pop, or most recently Los Angeles’ Substance Festival, carry an almost ceremonial energy, blurring the line between dream and devotion.
Across five studio albums, Magic Wands have cultivated a loyal following drawn to their atmosphere of mystery and metamorphosis. Their last release, Switch (2023), revealed a sleeker, more incandescent phase, expanded later that year through Switched, a reimagining of its songs by guest collaborators. Each new work feels like another spell cast in a continuing transformation, the duo forever orbiting that luminous space where sound becomes myth.
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