INTERVIEW The blood red aesthetics of Waterparks’ longawaited fifth album, Intellectual Property, are entirely fitting: the Texan pop-rockers have always beer loud and showy and a little off-the-rails, but here they’re downright vicious. It’s their shortest album (by a whole two minutes) but it’s easily their most diverse; plot-twists are aplenty, with necksnapping shifts from saccharine pop to scorching rock, all tied together with Awsten Knight’s sharpest quips and stickiest hooks.
As the singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and creative genius tells Australian Guitar, this record is Waterparks’ most ambitious because it needed to be. Their last disc, 2021’s Greatest Hits, was a gamutspanning epic that burrowed into and made a home out of every sound they’d ever played with - which, given the band’s total rejection of genre, meant it was…