LOS ANGELES, CA- On a weekday evening, I found myself driving through a quiet residential pocket of Inglewood. Wide streets. Parked cars. The calm familiarity of a neighborhood settling in for the night. The address I had been given didn’t lead to a commercial studio or a rehearsal complex. It led to a house.
I knocked hesitantly. An older woman opened the door and greeted me warmly. When I told her I was there to interview Inner Wave, she nodded and motioned for me to follow. I walked through the threshold, past a kitchen still fragrant with the remnants of dinner, and out into the backyard. At the rear of the property stood a garage.
Inside that garage was The Swamp: Inner Wave’s homemade studio.
Pablo Sotelo greeted me at the door, tall, relaxed, good-natured. We exchanged pleasantries before stepping inside a space clearly built over years. Guitars leaned against walls. Keyboards stacked neatly. Cables snaked across floors in organized chaos. It was a working studio, but it was also something more intimate. You could feel the history in it.
Inner Wave’s history runs deep. Formed in Gardena, California by childhood friends who have now been playing together for nearly two decades, the band has grown from high school jam sessions into one of Southern California’s most quietly enduring indie acts. They’ve played Tropicalia, hit a high watermark with Coachella in 2022, opened for Chicano Batman’s farewell shows, and celebrated the 10th anniversary of Sun Transmission at the Ford. Their catalog has racked up hundreds of millions of streams, but their foundation has always been local — garage-built, community-rooted, self-developed.
I had only discovered them months ago, but their music quickly became a staple on my gym playlist. There’s something about their groove… the balance between melody and motion… that reminded me of bands I’ve felt close to in the past. A little nostalgia. A little familiarity. But distinctly theirs. And as someone who grew up not far from Gardena and Torrance, there’s a particular pride in seeing a band emerge from that neighborhood and build something lasting.
We sat down in the garage to talk about their new material, and almost immediately the conversation turned toward sobriety.
Pablo didn’t dodge it.
“Yeah, I’m fully sober now, going on two years,” he told me. “I used to love to party and have a good time. But I got to a point where it was kind of dark… there was just a decision to be made… do I make a change or just kind of crash and burn?”
He doesn’t romanticize the shift. He describes it plainly.
“Making that decision to be sober is probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life,” he said. “My relationships have gotten better. But I feel that I was always chasing away boredom. Anytime there was a pause or a moment of stillness, it made me very uncomfortable.”
Sobriety, he explained, forced him to sit in that stillness.
“And I feel like now, in sobriety, there’s been so much more moments of boredom… so there’s a lot more daydreaming, which led to making this album the way it is — making the movie, making the book. I genuinely think it would have been impossible to make that if I was still drinking.”
That creative expansion is evident in the new record. Pablo describes it as “a breakup album,” but not in the conventional romantic sense.
“It’s a breakup album not just with relationships, but also with past ideas… old habits or ways of being.”
There’s a theme of push and pull that runs through the project. Touring tension. Home versus road. Desire versus contentment.
On the track “Sweet,” he sings, “The road becomes home,” but also, “You’re already home.” When I pressed him on that contradiction, he smiled.
“There’s always something you’re looking for… this eternal want. It’s like the human condition.”
That same ambiguity shows up in “Child,” one of the most affecting tracks on the record. Originally titled “Childhood,” the song captures a feeling of memory drifting further away.
“It reminds me of stuff we listened to when we were kids,” Pablo said. “It reminds me of going on a road trip… and lyrically it talks about time passing.”
There’s a refrain in the song — “you belong to me” — that feels personal, almost inward-facing. Pablo leaves the meaning open.
“I don’t even think it’s like a person,” he told me. “It’s more of maybe a concept or something. I like leaving that open.”
That openness extends across the band. When I asked each member which song resonated most personally, their answers revealed how differently they process the same body of work.
Eli pointed back to “Child.”
“It feels like something we would’ve heard on the radio when we were 11, skating every day,” he said. “I was actually talking with my therapist about the solo… I told him I picture a kid at a skate park, headphones on, bobbing his head.
Jean-Pierre gravitated toward “Wolfie,” a track he half-jokingly calls metal in his mind.
“It has this ‘dun-dun’ motif,” he explained. “That reminds me of a chug… and for some reason it feels like a metal song in my brain.”
But he also acknowledged something bigger happening beneath the surface.
“We all kind of stopped partying as much, but the music started rising in tempo.”
I jumped in and said it out loud.
“The music became the party.”
“Exactly,” Jean-Pierre laughed. “I didn’t want to say it, but you said it.”
Cruz, meanwhile, chose “If You Like,” a song born from a last-minute challenge to outdo themselves.
“I’m very much like riffs and ear candy, grooves,” he admitted. “As soon as someone starts singing, it just turns like wah, wah, wah. I just hear the melody.”
He described the track as having “too many riffs” at first, but that abundance is precisely what he loves.
“It’s like a candy… just a really groovy track. That’s my party.”
Pablo’s choice was the closer, “All of the Things,” a somber, vulnerable demo they ultimately kept intact rather than polishing further.
“The whole track’s pitched down,” he said. “We tried to re-record it, but something changed that didn’t feel as good as the demo… so we kept it.”
There’s something fitting about that. A band nearly twenty years deep still choosing instinct over perfection.
When we spoke about “Highways,” a song that references being “my brother’s keeper,” Pablo acknowledged that it came from real tension.
“We’ve been a band for almost 20 years now,” he said. “There’s going to be riffs and things that happen… I was very much a handful.”
He referenced the biblical story of Cain and Abel, explaining that the lyric captured a moment of reckoning.
“There wasn’t a change I could make and lose these friendships… that song is exploring that.”
And yet, for all the weight, there was humor too. When I jokingly asked whether “Far Away” had been inspired by Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” resurgence in Stranger Things, Pablo grinned.
“Legally, no.”
Laughter filled the garage.
As the night wrapped up, they outlined what’s ahead: the album release, the film premiere at Gardena Cinema on March 6, a U.S. tour with Los Besoneros, plans for Europe in the summer and a return to China in the fall — a fanbase born, as Pablo put it simply, from “the internet.”
Walking back out through the yard and into the quiet Inglewood street, I kept thinking about that garage. About the kitchen smells. About the years embedded in that space.
Inner Wave doesn’t feel like a band chasing trends. They feel like a group of friends who survived growing up together, survived internal friction, survived loss, survived sobriety — and kept making music.
Nearly twenty years in, the party may look different.
But it hasn’t stopped.
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Inside The Swamp: Inner Wave, Sobriety, and the Long Road Home
