Ottawa duo Wotts close out the year with one of their most intoxicating releases yet: ‘he spoke with conviction’, a shimmering mirage of a song that blurs the line between comfort and delusion. It’s psychedelic pop in soft focus; all warm and woozy on the surface, but carrying a quiet ache that lingers throughout.
Stepping back into the kaleidoscopic world that defined their early work, Jayem and Ricky 100 craft a track that feels like drifting through fog with only melody as your compass. The fingerprints of psych-pop heavyweights hover at the edges, but Wotts sculpt something unmistakably their own.
Jayem’s production is the anchor here. Everything feels lovingly smudged, as if the song is built from half-memories and slow-motion echoes. The guitars flicker like dust motes caught in afternoon light, the synths pulse like a heartbeat in a quiet room, and the vintage-leaning drums keep the whole thing gently afloat. It’s lush and airy, but there’s a subtle pressure here, like the tension of pretending things are fine when they’re not.
And that’s the emotional spine of ‘he spoke with conviction’. Wotts frame self-trickery with empathy, tying the song directly into the thematic thread of their upcoming EP ‘COPE’. If their last project traced the contours of loss, this next chapter digs into the strange, liminal space afterwards.
As their final release of 2025, ‘he spoke with conviction’ is a quietly devastating thesis statement for Wotts’ next era. There’s no grand emotional conclusion here. Instead, the duo invite us into the space where coping means drifting, burying, hoping, pretending, and occasionally finding a moment of peace.
If ‘FLANK!’ grieved what was lost, ‘COPE’ looks at what we carry after. And with ‘he spoke with conviction’, Wotts prove again that few indie-pop acts capture emotional nuance with such dreamy, delicate precision.