Tanner York doesn’t walk into a studio so much as he drags it with him, through Asheville apartments, the recording studio at UNC Asheville and his parents’ attic, leaving behind a trail of tape hiss, cheap snacks and a surprisingly serious collection of pop songs. York is your music obsessed friend anxiously waiting to leave a party to sing along to Beach Boys Instrumentals in his Subaru after sipping on his patented “Tanner Two,” a self-prescribed two lager limit. He spends his days obsessively scrolling through microphone reviews on one tab and a high-speed game of bootleg Tetris in another, thinking of all the different ways he can create the perfect drum sound. But when he plugs his guitar into the AC30 tucked away in his closet and presses record on his Tascam 488 MKII, all that scattered energy coalesces as he reveals himself in this sacred space as a budding hero of modern underground pop. On Welcome to the Shower, his joyfully weird and emotionally sincere debut album, released July 20 via Trash Tape Records, York transforms his obsessive ear and chaotic charm into something startlingly clear: lo-fi pop songs that sound like inside jokes until they suddenly hit like memories.

Before Tanner York started recording as Tanner York, he fronted a high-energy noise-pop duo called Diana Superstar. The early performances leaned into pure showmanship and black midi-esque chaos. “I thought my destiny was kind of like the noisy, blow-you-away live show,” York says. The songs were short-winded but bursting with excitement and creativity–jagged, stitched-together ideas that didn’t always complement one another, but hinted at a restless, ambitious musical mind. Over time though, he shifted his focus inward, discovering his real obsession wasn’t spectacle—it was the song. The melody. The chord changes. “I started realizing that what I value most is writing something that could pass the acoustic guitar test. Something sticky, something strong.” That pivot marks his growth, not just in style, but in intention as well, as he learned to craft nuanced, coherent pop songs that stick with you long after the tape stops rolling. 

That newfound clarity within his songwriting is what makes Welcome to the Shower so charming and so special. While the album brims with unconventional tape tricks and lo-fi quirks, it’s never a gimmick. York’s melodies are deceptively complex, his harmonies airtight. Tracks like “Girlfriend” and “Museum Broadway” are loaded with witty lyrical side-eyes—born from York’s interest in comedy and his brief but passionate detour into stand-up in Los Angeles—but they’re never too cool to not care. In fact, they care deeply, and that tension between irony and sincerity is part of what makes this record so endearing. 

In “Museum Broadway,” York paints a surrealist portrait of suburban malaise, full of strange observations and tongue in cheek imagery: “The movie theater with a fuck-ugly mural / Beside the frozen-over pond.” These are the kinds of lines he’s mastered that evoke laughter before shifting into emotional clarity over a key change when he drops the dry detachment to sing “everyday I think about just moving far away from here but I don’t have the time.” 

“Girlfriend” is equally clever, but more biting in its longing. It flirts with the melodrama but always lands somewhere painfully honest. “I heard she gave you a tattoo / of your dog that recently died” and “I could be everything she is” feel like throwaway one-liners until York twists them into a chorus that aches with restraint: “But you have a girlfriend / she loves you just fine.” It’s that careful balance between pettiness, humor, and vulnerability that makes York’s writing shine. His lyrics often read like someone trying not to cry by telling a joke and then accidentally revealing everything. 

While the lyrics may lean toward playful or indirect, York admits that’s partly a protective instinct: “One of the ways that I get myself to trust a lyric is to make it funny. It’s almost an insecurity thing, where it’s like, ‘oh, if I’m being funny then I’m above sincerity, which I’m trying to avoid, but I really do love songs with funny lyrics. Bands like Squeeze have incredibly funny lyrics, but they also write such amazing pop songs. I’ve always thought that novelties are in the same artistic bracket as something that’s attempting to be serious because it’s equally if not harder to pull off correctly.” That looseness, both as a defense mechanism and a genuine stylistic tool, often leads to wryly observational lines that sneak up on you and leave a mark. 

Last summer York spent a few months in Los Angeles, California working for a twitch streamer, Luke Taylor, editing his streams. He found himself at stand up comedy shows almost every other night trying out new jokes and meeting fellow comedians. Through this and by playing video games online, York found lots of personal inspiration by befriending many of his comedic and musical heroes.

“I was playing Fortnite with my friend Dan, who lives in New York, and one day he asked if his friend could join the lobby. It ended up being Will from Hotline TNT and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I love his music.’” York had recently become obsessed with Cartwheel, Hotline TNT’s latest album at the time. “In a lot of ways it felt adjacent to the goals I had where it was like the kind of Teenage Fanclub writing, pretty simple pop songs, but in the context of having super loud guitars and things like that.” The two began exchanging music and ideas over Discord. “From then on Will has been a big help for me, both giving feedback and also helping me navigate releasing a record and things like that. He’s been very wonderful.”

The process behind Welcome to the Shower is as loose and spontaneous as the music sounds. “I never wrote or recorded songs with the intention of them having a place on an album, which may explain the abundance of energetic songs rather than calmer ones,” York says. “I got very into recording with a Tascam 8-track cassette recorder after seeing the Elephant 6 documentary, and the immediacy immediately inspired me. I loved how it didn’t let me spend hours tweaking with settings. It forced me to think about the music first.”

He leaned into the tape’s limitations, experimenting with pitch shifts and speed manipulation. “Sometimes I’d record my vocals at a slower speed so that when I pitched them back up they’d sound higher. Recording on tape was really helpful because sometimes when I hear a song so many times I start to get sick of it and I start doubting it. I found that if I have a song and I’m starting to get sick of it, if I pitch it up a lot, it’s almost like listening to a new song and you get to hear the chord changes differently, it feels like you’re hearing the song as an outside listener. A lot of the time it would make me realize like, ‘oh, this is still a good idea. 
I just need to get out of my head.’ Sometimes I would just keep the pitch shifted version that way because I ended up liking how it sounded more.”  

Some tracks like the fluttery, hook-laden “All Over Again” were written, recorded, and fully mixed on tape in a single day. Others, like the textured “Cut Out,” went through multiple demos and incarnations before arriving at their final form. Whether immediate or hard-won, each song is bound by a deep, almost mythic pull toward pop itself. The shimmering ideal of a melodic, emotional, and endlessly replayable song. “I became really obsessed with pop song structure and key changes and what makes a good melody,” he says. “When I listen to great pop songs, I get so much joy from listening to them over and over, and singing along in my car. I just wanted to make songs that could fit in that space.”

With influences that range from The Beach Boys, Beatles, and XTC to contemporary weird-pop heroes like Sharp Pins, Combat Naps, and Chris Cohen, York isn’t reinventing pop so much as lovingly disassembling it and re-taping it back together, making it entirely his own. Welcome to the Shower reflects that patchwork spirit, full of jangly guitar tones, crisp comedic timing, and unpredictable but sophisticated chord changes, all stitched together into lo-fi power pop songs crafted with enormous care and an even bigger heart. 

One of the album’s most striking moments comes at the very end with “Blarry,” a devastating closer that peels back all the irony and reveals York exposed in a way that feels almost disarming. It’s a song about compromise, about trying to hold onto something already fading. “Do I, do I remind you / Of those days and long, long nights / When someone made an effort to believe you?” he asks, before answering himself with the heartbreaking clarity: “I’d walk a thousand miles / for someone just to lay beside / for that alone I’d trade anything.” Just when you think the jokes drop away as the melody stretches out in a remarkable moment of unguardedness, you get a  punch to the heart as the song abruptly ends in the middle of a line and you kind of want to strangle him.

Underneath all of the amusing remarks and the bent melodies, Welcome to the Shower is an album about longing and coming-of-age confusion. Its roots lie in York’s community in Asheville, at shows at Static Age Records, a local venue and record store that fosters a thriving music scene where York has seen and played with many of his heroes and made many of his friends, in conversations with older mentors, and in jam sessions with fellow UNC Asheville music technology students (now his live band). “With this record, I stopped trying to sound like anyone else,” he says. “I just chased the melodies I couldn’t get out of my head.”

Welcome to the Shower isn’t trying to prove anything, and that’s part of its charm. It’s the sound of someone falling in love with music all over again. Not for the aesthetic, or applause, but for the simple thrill of a well-placed key change, a sticky hook, or a lyric that makes you snort before it breaks your heart. Tanner York may still be figuring it all out, but if this record is any sign, he’s already miles ahead of the curve. His songs might start as jokes but they end as the kind you can’t stop thinking about for days on end. Welcome to the Shower is the perfect soundtrack to a hot summer night and the sound of someone arriving casually, hilariously, and with total clarity.

You can listen to Welcome to the Shower out everywhere you find your music. Pre-orders for your very own Tanner York CD are now open via the legendary Trash Tape Records.

Written by Eilee Centeno | Feature Photo by Hana Parpan