Cole Lumpkin has been quietly building something worth paying attention to. The New York-based multi-instrumentalist’s debut project HELIX established him as a genuinely resourceful artist — someone capable of handling the entire production chain himself, from composition through mixing, with a stylistic sensibility that situates him somewhere between synthwave, R&B, and the more soulful end of left-of-center pop. “Wreckage,” shows just how high his ceiling might be — though it also reveals the particular tensions that come with being an artist pushing at the edges of multiple genres at once.
The production is, in a word, immaculate. Lumpkin and co-producer Will Ross built “Wreckage” almost exclusively around two analog synthesizers — the TX7 and Matrix 6R — and the discipline of that constraint shows. The bassline, a hybrid of TX7 FM synthesis and an octave-shifted guitar via Neural DSP’s John Mayer plugin, is immediately arresting: harmonically rich, kinetic, with that slightly bell-like FM shimmer that puts it in conversation with the synth-bass innovations of Michael Jackson’s Bad era. The drums are similarly impressive — Afro-Cuban rhythmic foundations filtered through an ’80s pop shuffle, with live tracking at Lounge Studios lending the performance an organic snap. A bridge section pulls the track in a more Kaytranada-adjacent direction, introducing a welcome looseness and summer energy that opens the song’s emotional palette.
Where “Wreckage” gets slightly complicated is in its structural ambition. The track’s conceptual source — a love story between sparring partners at a boxing gym, filtered through a John Mayer’s “Neon”-style obsession with someone electric and impermanent — is genuinely compelling, and Lumpkin’s vocal performance commits fully to the emotional intensity the premise demands. But at moments, the track’s production density and its lyrical interiority feel like they’re pulling in slightly different directions. The hi-fi sheen is so present and so careful that it occasionally holds the listener at arm’s length from what is, at its core, meant to be a raw, almost physical feeling.
This is, admittedly, a fine line to walk. And Lumpkin walks it more successfully than most. The track’s final minutes, propelled by those live drums and the looser bridge energy, find the balance he’s after — something dark but alive, wounded but not defeated. If the opening two-thirds sometimes prioritize sonic architecture over emotional immediacy, the back half earns back everything and then some..
“Wreckage” is available now.
