Javier Reyes/Photo: Courtney Yates
Javier Reyes has already released four singles from his new album, “Shark,” out July 10, a record he somehow found time to make in the midst of putting out a 2025 album with Post Animal, the Chicago band he’s played with since 2014; spending much of 2025 on the road with Djo as a guitarist in the live band; and touring with Slow Pulp as a guest guitarist in 2024. It’s his third solo album, following “Big Amigo” from 2021 and “How’s Javi” from 2024. The sound is hazy indie rock threaded with synthesizers and restless electronic energy. Ask him about his creative process and he’ll explain that on “Shark,” many of the tracks came out of bits and pieces he made in the past and ideas he documented while busy with the other projects and tours.
He talks about songwriting the way some people talk about finding a ten-dollar bill in an old winter coat. It’s a lot of surprise and delight. There’s gratitude and a touch of mysticism in the way he describes ideas arriving and developing. Of course, when you unexpectedly find cash in a pocket, it’s usually because you put it there yourself. That’s the deal with one of the strongest tracks on the album, “Never Follow You.”
He had started writing it for a previous album, but decided against using it. “Maybe I just wasn’t feeling it,” he says. “I put it away and thought nothing of it.” Then, while flying over South America during a Djo tour in March, he was looking through old audio files on his phone. “I found that one, listened to it, and was like, oh, this kind of has a specific feeling. I kind of saw the light in it.”
For a while, he positioned “Never Follow You” as the album opener, but he changed his mind at the last minute and moved it to track six. For the first couple minutes, the song sounds like a beautiful, fairly straightforward acoustic lament. There’s guitar, clear vocals and the faint sound of fingers sliding across strings. Everything proceeds as you’d expect, then an airplane takes off—literally. A low mechanical rumble emerges beneath the song, and when I ask Reyes about it, he confirms: “It’s the sound of a plane taking off.” It’s a transitionary noise that eases into a heavy, four-on-the-floor pulse, and the song transforms into something closer to a club track.
Reyes says he wrote “Never Follow You” on acoustic guitar and later added kick drum and synthesizers while editing it on his computer. “I couldn’t help myself,” he says. But it was initially more restrained: “It sounded like it was a little covered up, and it was more low-fi. Then my friend Adam Thein, who mixed it, pulled the cover off and made it way more electronic. I trusted his impulse there.”
If Reyes has a creative philosophy, it seems to involve spending less time worrying about whether an idea is “right” and more time seeing what happens when he follows it. A surprising number of the songs on “Shark” begin with something that could easily have been ignored: an old recording, a throwaway phrase, a strange sound, a joke. A prime example of this is the album’s first released single, “Might Just Take the Oor.” It began in a green room in Cardiff, Wales, while he was touring with Slow Pulp in June 2024.
He was playing an unplugged electric guitar, singing nonsense lyrics while bandmates laughed in the background. Listeners shouldn’t overanalyze words and phrases like “oor” or “siquatic bodies” in the lyrics. “I was just being weird,” Reyes says. “Just letting the mind go slack and being weird.” The line “Might just take the L, so cry about it,” refers to the idea of accepting a loss or a failure, he says. (I checked if it had anything to do with the Chicago train system, but that hadn’t even crossed his mind.)
Javier Reyes’ “Shark” album cover/Photo: Julia Carpenter
The distinctive quality of the song comes in large part from the sly and curious vocal performance of Reyes’ girlfriend, Julia Carpenter. Her contribution is one of many examples of Reyes acting on a whim. “I was literally just about to go record the vocal, and she was in the living room, and I just impulsively was like ‘do you want to sing this?’” Reyes explains. She said sure. “We were just being weird. She did it once, and it was cool. And then I was like, ‘What if we did almost like a baby voice or something? A little more delicate?’ We were just having fun with it,” a recurring theme. The finished song is dreamy and warm, roiling over synthesizers and a forceful beat and a strange undercurrent of melancholy and resignation.
Wordplay was also the starting point for “Bud or Amor,” a song that revolves around a question familiar to anyone who has ever spent too much time analyzing a text message: Are we buds, or are we more? Is it amor? You get the idea. With a smooth groove and persistent beat, the song sketches a scene of mixed signals and the small humiliations that come with not knowing where you stand.
The theme of romance doesn’t simplify itself from there. On “I Could Disappear With You,” Reyes sings about loving someone through a period when they are struggling and lashing out. I ask him whether he had done something different to his vocals, because they take on a youthful vulnerability, an almost retro quality compared to other synth-layered sounds on the album. “It’s just not touched,” he says. “I had a version that was really locked in, but it just lost something.” It was the right call. It sounds both sweet and a little bruised, and that’s what makes it convincing.
“Yolanda” grew out of a sort of guitar warm-up that Reyes has been playing for years. “There are songs you make in the time period of the album, and then songs that come from a weird little impulsive guitar exercise that you’ve just been doing for a big chunk of your life,” Reyes says. “Then you think, maybe I’ll just run with that thing.” He turned it into a groovy, uneasy drift of a song, with a heavy shuffling beat and wailing guitar lines that weave in and out.
After all the uneasy grooves, wandering guitar lines and pulsing synths, Reyes strips things back. “King Galore” is the album’s prettiest moment, floating on acoustic guitar and a simple message: “see what love can do.” It’s not quite a minute and a half long, but it gently nudges the album into a softer space, which continues on the next track, “Black Hole.” This song moves with an easy sway, Reyes singing in a lower register than elsewhere on the album. It also contains the line that, inexplicably, earwormed its way into my head more than any other: “been up since half past quarter to midnight.”
“No Ifs” closes things out with country-tinged guitar lines that give it a faint Western quality. Listening to it, I keep thinking of a dusty, fun soundtrack in some nineties road movie. More than any other song on the album, it feels carefree, with shimmering synths and an infectious beat. Where other songs on “Shark” circle around questions and complications, this one feels more like casting caution to the wind.
Trust, whether in love or in creative outcomes, seems to be a big part of how “Shark” was made and the themes it explores—and maybe of Reyes’ broader philosophy. He talks about encouraging a loved one who was wrestling with a major decision, and Reyes’ advice was simple: “the answer will reveal itself.” That’s more or less how he landed on the album title. One day, he says, the word “Shark” simply downloaded into his brain. Later, while playing pool at Chris’ Billiards, his girlfriend snapped a close-up photo of him with a rack of pool balls reflected in his glasses. Looking at it afterward, they immediately recognized that it would make a good album cover. And of course, with the name “Shark” already chosen, the connotation of a pool shark fit perfectly.
Reyes starts describing other meanings that came to his mind later—sharks as solitary creatures, symbols of ruthlessness, reminders that ambition can cost a person the things that matter most. Then he quickly waves most of that away. Meaning can always be added afterward. The important part is recognizing which weird little ideas are worth hanging onto.
