I don’t know how to feel but I want to try. What I Was Made For is helping.
I am neither an overly large fan nor a hater of Billie Eilish. The same applies to Greta Girwig’s Barbie. What I have become a decidedly significant fan of is Iress, emerging underground superstars on the increasingly stellar Dune Altar label. It feels like Dune Altar can’t screw up lately and neither, it seems, can Iress. I was already a supporter of 2020’s Flaw and the masterful 2024 release Sleep Now, In Reverse. The mixture of pop, shoegaze, doom, and bad dreams present in their sound is exactly something that I look for.
The same can’t be said of a Billie Eilish cover in general. This time, though, I’ve been proven wrong. Maybe I should have focused more on Eilish’s songwriting. Because if “What Was I Made For” proves anything, Eilish is both an accomplished songwriter worthy of greater attention for that facet and Iress is a band that is going places. Fast. Faster than a bullet, faster than Superman in a nerd’s dreams. They’re taking this rocketship to Mars and beyond.
Iress is one of those bands that’s so brilliant on so many levels, yet the sum is greater than its parts. Michelle Malley’s vocals and guitars are the perfect frontispiece to lend color to the texture of Graham Walker’s guitar work, Michael Maldonado’s solid as fuck basslines, and Glenn Chu’s tasteful yet lively drumming. Taken apart (how I wish they would solo out their parts in YouTube videos just to understand the complexity they’ve built), these are stellar musicians living out a fantasy of aural experience. Taken together? My god, what have they done?
I don’t want to pretend that this song won’t have its detractors. Some might say it’s “too pop,” others that it’s “not pop enough.” I’m just happy that these four forward-thinking musicians decided to do something few of us in this scene are willing to do: embrace popular taste. Popular may be a devilish word, but it ties to fucking brain chemistry, on the universal chords that tie us together. Iress has tapped into that sound and made it their own.
Don’t ignore what’s right in front of you. “What was I made for,” sings Michelle Malley. Clearly, this is it.