Dreamwake

From New Haven, by way of The Midnight

Dreamwake formed in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2018, but the decision that shaped them had already been made a year earlier. The members discovered the synthwave duo The Midnight in 2017, and told Dead Rhetoric in August 2025 that the find reset what they wanted the band to sound like. The lineup has held as a four-piece since: Bobby Nabors on vocals, Dave Pazik on guitar, Kevin Jacques on bass and Andrew Popolizio on drums. The name they coined for the result is wavecore — progressive metalcore riffing written through synthwave rather than decorated with it.

The saxophone, now the fastest way to identify a Dreamwake track, began as a one-off. The band first used it on an early song called "Paradise", bringing in Jesse Molloy, who plays sax in The Midnight. Their account of it is unsentimental: it was something different, and it worked, so it stayed. Molloy has since played on every Dreamwake recording.

Luna, Virtual Reality and the independent years

The first single to travel beyond Connecticut was "Luna", released on 20 April 2021 with a video directed by Alex Kouvatsos at Blackwolf Imaging. It was tracked in Cleveland, Ohio with Steve Perrino and mixed and mastered by Nicolas Delestrade at DNA Music Studio. The band described it then as an attempt to address the darkest parts of a person, built on the premise that everyone struggles in their own way, and positioned it as a transitional piece pointing at where the writing was heading.

The numbers around that release say how small the operation still was. Dreamwake had passed 40,500 Spotify streams, the video for "Kaizen" was approaching 10,000 views, and the headline achievements were a sold-out local EP release show and support slots with Polyphia and Issues. The reference points they offered were ERRA and Spiritbox for the heavy material and The Midnight for everything else. Their debut album Virtual Reality followed in 2022, made without label backing.

UNFD and The Lost Years

The signing to UNFD was announced on 20 November 2024, timed with the video for "Heatwave" — a song about being stuck in one place while everything around it changes. The band called working with the label an honour and said its belief in their music meant a great deal. Three weeks later, on 13 December, they headlined the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts, with Sentinels, Crush, Knifedance, Rose Lane and Devitalized underneath them.

The Lost Years arrived on 8 August 2025: twelve tracks, among them "Stargazer", "Daydream", "Dark Eternal", "Memories", "Cold Summer", "VHS Dreams", "Afterglow", "Supernova", "White Noise", "Oasis", "Static Haze" and "Heatwave". Pazik framed it as a deliberate widening in both directions at once — more heavy passages than Virtual Reality, and deeper synthwave underneath them. Nabors described the subject matter as the page-turning in life, the identity problems and course corrections of adulthood, handled without landing on despair.

Asked in September 2025 to sum the record up in three words, the four of them produced two different answers: elegant, emotional and heavy from one, melancholy, vibes and nostalgic from another. Both are defensible readings of the same forty minutes, which is part of why the album divided people.

How the record landed

The specialist metal press was largely won over. Dead Rhetoric's Katarina McGinn scored it 9.5 out of 10 on 1 August 2025, singling out how the album marries djent-leaning, occasionally proggy metalcore to electronics and saxophone without the seams showing, and noting that the sax features on every track without once feeling tacked on. She called it an impressive second album that raised the bar, and credited the band with standing alone in how far they push the synthwave-and-metal boundary.

Carl Fisher, reviewing on 8 June 2025 ahead of release, went to a full 10 out of 10, describing the record as one of the best things he had heard that year and warning that it demands undivided attention rather than background listening. His reading leaned on the emotional load — material that produces joy and sorrow at the same time — and on the band managing to sound nostalgic and modern at once.

The one consistent reservation concerns the density. A 9 out of 10 review published on 5 August 2025 praised Pazik's riffing, rated the middle five tracks as the album's strongest stretch and called the record a fully realised version of the band's vision, while conceding that its core elements may wear on some listeners, the heavy-handed use of saxophone in particular. That is the honest summary of the critical position: nobody disputes that Dreamwake occupy a niche almost no one else is in, and the argument is about how much of the niche a single album can take.

Where they are in October 2026

The touring record is the clearest measure of the past two years. Setlist.fm has logged 130 Dreamwake sets since 2019, 46 of them in 2025 and 22 across 2026 so far. The 2025 run included a seven-date stint with Miss May I, Gideon and Soulkeeper, then a national support tour with Thousand Below that ended in Los Angeles on 13 September, with further dates alongside Aviana and True North.

2026 moved them up a tier of room. On 10 and 11 April they played the opening two dates of the August Burns Red and The Amity Affliction co-headline Spring Horizons tour — the Palladium in Worcester and College Street Music Hall in New Haven — taking Heavensgate's place on those nights, with Boundaries as special guests. The tour itself ran from 10 April to 17 May, finishing in Philadelphia. On Sunday 20 September they played Louder Than Life at the Highland Festival Grounds in Louisville, part of a four-day bill of more than 200 acts topped by Iron Maiden, My Chemical Romance, Limp Bizkit and Tool.

What is on sale now is their first substantial run outside North America. Dreamwake open PRESIDENT's Blood of Your Empire European and UK campaign through November 2026, third on a bill with vianova, in support of the masked band's debut album released on 4 September 2026. The routing opens at Slaktkyrkan in Johanneshov on 1 November and takes in Amager Bio in Copenhagen on the 3rd, Berlin on the 5th, Munich on the 9th, X-TRA in Zürich on the 12th, Paris on the 14th, Tilburg on the 15th and the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on the 16th. The UK leg runs Cardiff's Depot on the 18th, Glasgow on the 19th, Manchester on the 21st, O2 Academy Birmingham on the 23rd and O2 Academy Brixton on the 24th.

The set as it stands

Dreamwake's 2026 sets are support-length and built accordingly. Across the complete setlists logged this year the average is six songs — "Stargazer", "Oasis", "Daydream", "Cold Summer", "Afterglow" and "Memories" — with no encore, which is normal for a third-billed act. "Stargazer" opened five of those six shows and "Heatwave" the sixth; "Memories" closed four and "Night Rider" the other two.

Across all 22 shows this year the most-played songs are "Memories" at 22 appearances, "Night Rider" at 19, "Neon" at 18 and "Heatwave" at 15 — in other words, the set barely changes, which is the right call when most of the room has not heard the band before. The New Haven date on 11 April, a hometown show in a 2,000-capacity hall, ran "Stargazer", "Oasis", "Heatwave", "Memories" and "Night Rider". Rarities exist but stay rare: "VHS Dreams" and "Static Haze" have each been played once.