wishlane’s “SUCKER PUNCH” Hits Like an Existential Gut Check

If you’ve ever felt like a ghost in your own life, “SUCKER PUNCH” might hit a little too close to home. The latest release from 22-year-old artist and producer wishlane is a fragile, slow-burning spiral of emotion that never begs for validation. Instead, it lingers like smoke in your lungs, heavy, personal, and strangely comforting.

Emerging from Atlanta’s underground, wishlane has spent the last few years refining a sound that lives somewhere between alternative pop, ambient emo, and lo-fi heartbreak. “SUCKER PUNCH” is arguably his most introspective piece to date, written initially as a personal outlet that wasn’t even meant to see the light of day. But the lyrics proved sticky. They started haunting him. So he gave them a new instrumental and a second life.

The result is a track that leans into dissonance without losing its emotional center. The distorted vocals feel like thoughts echoing in a tiled bathroom. The lo-fi production eschews polish in favor of a more human quality. Each element is intentional but messy in the best way, like a notebook scribbled in the dark.

Lyrically, “SUCKER PUNCH” is a quiet reckoning with yourself. It’s not melodramatic or desperate. It’s tired. It’s reflective. It captures the exact moment when you realize you’re stuck but haven’t figured out what comes next. The track doesn’t offer a solution, and that’s why it works.

For fans of artists like Jean Dawson, Glaive, or Underscore, this is anti-pop that cuts deeper than it lets on. It’s a song for the moments between moments. A soundtrack for questioning everything and finding comfort in not knowing. wishlane isn’t trying to save you. He’s just letting you know you’re not the only one still searching.

“SUCKER PUNCH” was originally just for you. What changed your mind about releasing it?

I'm not really sure, to be totally honest! I figured I'd shown it to enough friends of mine and they all seemed to like it, so I might as well release it. Most of my songs work like that, I sort of have a tendency to use my friends as a sort of focus group for whatever I made since the last time we talked, and SUCKER PUNCH was a consistent favorite among everyone I'd shown it to, so I invited a couple of those friends to work on it in some capacity and then I just figured "screw it. I'm gonna release this, too much effort's gone into it at this point not to drop it."

There’s a raw, almost analog texture to this track. How intentional was the sonic messiness?

Some parts of it were very intentional, but others were complete accidents that just grew on me as the song progressed. The drums, for example, were just a placeholder at first, and I was originally gonna get someone to record live drums, but as it went on, the placeholder drums won me over enough that they made it into the final cut. I did want some additional stuff there, so I had my friend Kirin (aka KBL) record some cymbals on top, and called that done. The synths, however, were very much an intentional thing. I wanted this song to have a vaguely 80's sort of feel to it, so I went to a friend of mine's house and I just spent like two hours recording different variations of the chords I wanted on their synthesizer, until I eventually got the one I wanted by literally recording the chords note by note and then layering them together.

You’ve carved a space in the underground scene. What’s the most misunderstood thing about anti-pop?

I'm gonna be completely candid for a second, which I hope doesn't come across as rude at all, and say I'm most definitely not the person to ask about what's misunderstood in antipop. I kind of hate genres and labels in general, so I just go off what people tend to categorize my music as and run with whichever one feels right. I will say I think of anti-pop as more of a response to conventional pop music, rather than its weirder subset, or its red-headed stepchild, so to speak, and I'd like to think of what I make as being under a similar umbrella to that. I like to take conventional tropes and turn them on their head, and I'm sorry if that makes me sound like I think I'm some pioneer of it or something. I'm not, I just like using weird methods to get normal(ish) sounds, and I think that's kind of what anti-pop is, at least to me.

What emotions came up when hearing this track finished and finalized?

The emotions that come up when I hear any of my songs' final drafts are always some mixture of catharsis and anxiety over whether they're really "done" or not, and SUCKER PUNCH was no different. There are about seven files on my computer that are all named some variation of "SUCKER PUNCH FINAL" and, from a listener's perspective, I'd imagine the differences are almost imperceptible. But deciding on one to put out definitely brought a lot of nervousness, in terms of hoping I'd made the right call. I still hope I made the right call, and judging by people's response to the song, I think I did, but there's always that lingering thought of "what if it would've done better with that master instead" or "what if people would've liked it more with that one bassline changed".

Do you see music as therapy, rebellion, or something else entirely?

I see it as both things! They're definitely not mutually exclusive in my opinion, and I think making music, or any form of art in general, can be about personal healing at the same time as being about pushback in a public sense. For example, going back to the question about anti-pop as a genre, I would definitely consider it a form of rebellion, not in the same sense that punk rock or hardcore are, but in the sense that it is anti-pop or alt-pop or what have you. It's about taking conventional pop music and flipping it on its head. That's not to say conventional pop music is bad, I mean, it's popular for a reason, but sometimes you just want to make something that colors outside the lines a little bit, and I think that's where I lie.

So, with regard to that, maybe I'm more so in the rebellion camp, but there's definitely also a bit of personal therapy that comes from getting to create something that exists outside yourself that you don't get from going on hikes or switching to tea or doing yoga. Those things are all well and good, and I'd be a hypocrite to say otherwise. I do all three of them, but there's something uniquely cathartic and beautiful about creating something, whether it be a song, a video, or a painting, and just putting it out into the world.