Song Souvenirs and Shooting Straight: Sink into Javier Reyes' New Solo Album, "Shark"
If you’re even remotely interested in the Chicago music scene, or just a fan of modern day rock music— chances are you’ve listened to or seen a live performance of Javier Reyes in one form of another, even if you didn’t realize it. When the Chicago-based musician isn’t making music and playing shows with his band Post Animal, or touring with Djo and Slow Pulp, he pours his creative energy into writing and recording music as a solo artist.
Reyes’ labor of love has most recently come to fruition in the form of his third full-length record, entitled Shark, and available to listen to today. The 10 tracks on the album came together from 2022 to 2025 during the in-between moments and rare free time that Reyes had while pursuing his other musical projects with his friends and bandmates.
Ahead of Shark’s release date, I met up with Reyes at Dot’s Cafe to get the scoop on his solo creative process, his professional aspirations and drive, his Spotify Wrapped playlists, his signature scent and much more.
Shark album cover. Photo by Julia Carpenter
Javier Reyes describes the moments of piecing his third album together almost like collecting souvenirs and trinkets to bring home during his travels while he was on tour during the last few years—mostly with Slow Pulp in 2023 and 2024, then with Djo and Post Animal in 2025. “Having that kind of touring schedule, a lot of the writing is like those random moments when you pick up a guitar in a green room, or during a soundcheck, or maybe on an off day at a music store. You just pull out the voice memos and you record that little idea.” Once the ideas started flowing, Reyes would work on fully fleshing out the songs when he returned back to Chicago, or sometimes still during the midst of traveling. “Whenever I get some downtime, like say on an airplane when there's no service, I listen to those voice memos, pull up the notes I have, write down the lyrics. I try to discern the gibberish that I was saying in the voice memos,” he adds.
On Shark, Reyes kept the creative process pretty stripped back, but he got by with some help with his friends when it came time to recording the music. The Shark skeleton crew included his girlfriend Julia Carpenter, former Dolores bandmate and producer Adam Thein, and Post Animal bandmate Wes Toledo. However, Reyes laid the foundation for most of the recording by himself at home in his hybrid guest room/studio that he simply calls his “music room” because his recording gear is so minimal. Overall, the process for his solo material is much different than when he and his bandmates in Post Animal work together. “For Post Animal, we’ll set aside specific, intentional big chunks of time. But for me, it's just an amalgamation of all those little slivers of time,” he says.
Outside of the recording done at Reyes’ apartment, Wes Toledo’s drum parts were recorded at Slow Pulp’s practice studio and then Adam Thein assisted with the mixing and mastering of it all. “Working with Adam has been a highlight because the hard part for me is over—I've recorded all of it and written it all. It’s like he shines my super amateur thing. I’ve heard Julia [Carpenter] describe it as ‘shining a turd.’ It’s like I’m giving him a dusty fossil and he’s excavating it and dusting it off, making it presentable and making it ready for a museum,” Reyes reminisces.
I asked Reyes if he had a favorite “happy accident” during the entire process of crafting these songs, and as it turns out he considers the entire solo project to essentially be one big happy accident that turned out great (in my humble opinion). These songs formed from the self-proclaimed gibberish and “lightening in a bottle” moments where inspiration strikes suddenly and sometimes unexpectedly. “I think being an artist— it's all about capturing those moments, those lightning in a bottle of creative moments,” he says. As a listener, I can’t help but agree that the best music is the kind that is created by an artist who is so naturally inspired that they can’t help but metaphorically put pen to paper (or record a voice memo) as the song just flows out of them.
Reyes further describes the experience of collaborating with his partner Julia Carpenter (no relation to Sabrina, Karen or John) on the songs “Bud or Amor” and “Might Just Take The Oor.” (By the way, I asked, and no it wasn’t intentional that the couple primarily worked together on the two songs with the rhyming titles). “I have always known her as one of these many-talented musicians who is really understated about it and doesn’t really pursue it as a recording artist. She sings, plays guitar and will write little songs and cover songs,” he starts. Naturally I asked if she also crushes it at karaoke, which was a resounding yes. “She does it not in the way where it’s too much vibrato and it’s like ‘ok, chill out. ok, diva, you didn’t have to make us all feel bad!’ She does it and just has a swagger about it where it’s on and sounds really good,” he adds.
Reyes recalls hearing a cover of “Weird Fishes” by Radiohead that Carpenter did with another musician friend of theirs. “I just remember hearing her voice, thinking yeah, there's something that’s really special to it. And so I'd always been a fan of her voice. Once we started dating and started sharing more space, started getting closer to living together and then living together, she started popping her head in and being curious, and wants to hear everything. And she has an opinion, in a great way,” he says with admiration. Case in point, Reyes had been working at their dining room table on the foundation for the album’s opening track “Bud or Amor” when Carpenter came home from work in the middle of it. “It was one of the ones where I didn’t think much of it, but I recorded it just for fun. Then she heard it, and had a positive reaction to it. It was one of those where you don’t know what you have.” Reyes asked if she wanted to record on it then, and they ended up working together to write the second verse that night. “We went and got a six pack of Guinness, had a bunch of that, wrote the second verse together and recorded it in the living room. She records really fast, she’s a pro. We have a good combo where I have the ideas but I don’t always execute as fast, but when she knows what she wants to do or needs to do, she can execute fast,” he recalls.
Reyes also shared the origin story of “Might Just Take The Oor,” which is the second song on the album’s tracklist and also features Carpenter on vocals. He says it was in Cardiff, Wales in June of 2024 when he was on tour with Slow Pulp, and he started playing around on the guitar with what eventually became the aforementioned single while the other members of the band chimed in. “We get a little slaphappy, all the sleep deprivation and kind of spending all this time with one group of friends,” he told me as he played a clip of the original voicenote from his phone. After the initial rough outline, Reyes says he continued the brainstorming and building on the song later on during a run with Slow Pulp in the US. “We were in Boston. I remember loading out during the rain and I remember singing the second part, like the chorus part. I remember just holding a kick drum, I'm walking out of this venue and just singing the melody. It’s just random. Sometimes things just pop into your head, and voice memos are the best to record all of it and remember all of it. It's just indulging in your bullshit, indulging those little tangential thoughts. It's chasing those and making them real,” he adds.
“King Galore” is another track on the album that we chatted about more in depth. The eighth track on the album, its lush and warm guitar mixed with Reyes’ reverberated vocals reminded me of 1970’s ballads a la REO Speedwagon or Fleetwood Mac. Reyes says the guitar part on that song felt very Joni Mitchell or ‘70s Laurel Canyon, and he credited his mom listening to a lot of singer-songwriters and Indigo Girls when he was growing up. “Thematically, it's like slow down—because a lot of what I do with the touring life, making this record, making music and just kind of grinding. Then when I’m not doing that I’m like oh, I have to be healthy and exercise, or hang out with friends and be a good boyfriend,” he says. The song lyrics “Slow/Keep on rocking/Dead man walking/Keep it on low. See what love can do for your eyes, your smile/You have been broken” allude to the hustle culture mentality that so many of us are accustomed to and the mindset that we have to keep going and keep working all of the time. Reyes says his message with this song is to remember to slow down and to prioritize love, and loving people who you’re enjoying their company. Focus on the simple things in life and the things that matter.
On the subject of appreciating what matters in life, I asked Reyes about a scary moment in his medical history, and how it may have shaped how he takes care of himself and his routine while touring. In November 2017, Post Animal was on the road with White Reaper when Reyes suffered a stroke during their show at Le Poisson Rouge. Reyes recounts the events, explaining that it ultimately stemmed from too-intense head banging that was inspired by his friend Cadien Lake James in Twin Peaks. “We cut our teeth opening for Twin Peaks. They've always just been absolute idols to me,” he says. Over and over, he’d admire the way James would seamlessly swivel his head around while playing guitar, so naturally he wanted to try it himself. “I just loved that and I did it myself as a kid. I think we all did. When you take a picture— There's the cover of a Sum 41 album,” he adds, referring to head-shaking snapshots on the band’s All Killer No Filler record.
“I was doing it that whole tour,” Reyes says about the head swiveling. “But something about New York, I just did it way too hard. I got a vertebral artery dissection where I basically kind of popped an artery in my neck, which created a blood clot and led to a stroke.” The stroke landed him in the hospital, bedridden for about six days before he had to do physical rehab to continue to gain his motor functionality back in his left hand and left side of his body.
From Post Animal’s hometown show at Metro on November 14, 2017—Reyes was still recovering, but he was at the show in spirt and via cardboard cutout- Photo by Rachel Zyzda
Reyes played an old voice memo he had from shortly after that time, where he was practicing the guitar for the song “Post Animal” from their album Forward Motion Godyssey but his dexterity was very limited (still better than I could do!) “For the years following, it was rehab, and sort of just trying to slow down. There were a lot of things I couldn’t do. No chiropractic work, no amusement parks, no skiing, no trampolines, like basically anything too intense on your body,” he says. While the experience was a traumatic and trying one to say the least, Reyes also credits it with changing his life with a newfound perspective. “It made me actually aware that life is very precious and that it could go away at any ordinary moment. When I was younger, I grew up in the Jackass age and I was this little mischievous kid. I was a skateboarder too, and I just thought I was elastic and everything would be ok. Then I learned that you could fly too close to the sun, and I got really close. It was an accident, but it was a wake up call to take care,” he adds. Now when friends are cliff-diving into water or partaking in other adrenaline-inducing activities, Reyes says he takes a backseat and he’ll watch, rather than participating.
For the most part, Reyes has recovered from the incident, but he does still deal with chronic pain or recurring symptoms while out on the road. He shared that sometimes his hand will get tingly, or his vision will get a little funny, and the doctors say things like that are the after effect. “There’s so many moments when we’d be in the van late at night and somebody would say something really funny. We'd all be laughing really hard and I’d laugh so hard that I would make the pain come back. I'd get really serious and all of a sudden I realized we're in rural Nebraska driving at midnight, and I’m Googling the nearest hospital. It’s hard, it’s a lot of talking yourself down,” he shares. Reyes showed a lot of vulnerability talking about this pivotal and traumatic moment in his life, but he’s really been able to reframe it and use it as motivation to keep chasing his dreams with his friends. “It made me very much thankful for the opportunity that I have to be able to do this. To be able to live life at all, but to be able to do this life and to do it with people who are so sweet and generous, caring and talented,” he says. He also says he does a lot of breathing exercises and counting to keep his anxiety down and to try to prevent symptoms from popping back up. Maybe an idea for his next album: Guided Meditation by Javier Reyes?
Various photos of Reyes playing with Post Animal, Djo or Slow Pulp. All photos by Rachel Zyzda
“It made me actually aware that life is very precious and that it could go away at any ordinary moment.”
“King Galore” contains the reminder to slow down and appreciate the little moments in life, but there’s another song on the album that features a big tonal shift, starting with a sense of melancholic yearning that reaches a euphoric pivot in the outro. The sixth song on Shark, called “Never Follow You,” almost sounds like a sonic manifestation of the journey that Reyes has been on with his recovery after the stroke; At first we hear a slow and somber melody that builds into this stronger and bolder perspective. Lyrically, however, the song tells the story of being at a crossroads in a relationship. The track kicks off with Reyes singing “I’ll never follow you” in the first chorus and leads into him adding the line “Unless of course I have to” during the second chorus just as the electronic crescendo creeps in. Reyes says the first part of the song was just him singing along to acoustic guitar, and then he introduces an electronic sub bass note and the sound of airplane, which signals the literal departure from the beginning of the song. “It’s definitely a song about the stubbornness of being in a relationship that’s not working. Sometimes if something isn’t working, it’s almost like there’s a Y in the road. On one side, there’s growth, learning, and fighting for the relationship. I'm going to keep digging. Maybe there's something more I can do myself. Then the other route is accepting the fact that it’s not working is a sign that we shouldn’t be together. It’s kind of defeatist, but it can be real and it can be the right route,” he says.
Moving on to a more lighthearted tone, I asked Reyes a few more questions inspired by the title or lyrics of other songs on Shark. I’ve already mentioned a few different aural influences that I picked up on the aforementioned songs, but we’ve also got “Take It” which is reminiscent of the early 2000’s NYC rock scene, featuring jovial guitars and an effortlessly cool vocal delivery. One of the singles “I Could Disappear With You” features more warm guitars and fuzzy vocals, conjuring up images of a Rom-Com movie montage where the couple falls in love. Naturally, I was curious what Reyes was listening to during the years he wrote and recorded these songs and what may have provided inspiration via osmosis. If someone asks me what I’ve been listening to, my mind automatically goes blank, but luckily he was able to pull up his Spotify Wrapped playlists starting with 2023 to take the trip down musical memory lane. “I’ve got the world of music in the palm of my hand and I’m constantly digging back,” he says, crediting The Beatles as one of his consistent inspirations throughout the years. Other bands that were in his rotation in recent years include The Lemon Twigs, Mac DeMarco, The Replacements, Toro y Moi, and Arthur Russell— and his playlist also included some of his fellow Chicagoans and friends like Slow Pulp, Hazel City (Clay Frankel of Twin Peaks), Liam Kazar, Cadien Lake James (also of Twin Peaks), and Squirrel Flower. “It's a lot of old random music, a lot of ‘70s, classical, some bluegrass…some jazzy, funky stuff. And then peppered in there are Chicago artists,” Reyes says.
The album’s closing track “No Ifs” has this peppy melody paired with ‘80s-esque synths that make it sound like it’s the protagonist’s theme song in a John Hughes-adjacent movie. In the song, Reyes sings “I’ve got no ifs or doubts about it,” so I asked him what else is on his “no list” for 2026. His official list includes the following—“No no-self doubt, no overcooking, no tweaking. No being mean. No scoffing or scrunching your eyebrows too much. Not too much sarcasm or roasting. Roasting people can be fun, but not in a mean way. No more bullshit. No lying. No more Caesar haircuts…I think they’re out. And not too baggy of the jeans. Just jeans that fit. Not too boxy of a t-shirt. No hive mind.” Here’s to a starting a “shark mind” movement that is all about being direct, making a decision and moving forward with it. Oh, and clothes that fit properly!
Jumping way back to the song “Might Just Take The Oor,” I also asked Reyes what was a hill he was willing to die on; Inspired by the line “might just take the L,” I wanted to know something that he wasn’t willing to take a loss on. He paused for a long time to soul search for his answer, before ultimately “phoning a girlfriend” and calling Julia to see what her take would be on it. In shark-minded fashion, she quickly answered that a hill he will die on is that “it’s always better to shoot from the hip.” An answer that felt like a full circle moment with the album’s creative process and title (more on that in a moment), Reyes did make the caveat that he tends to really only shoot from the hip creatively, rather than in everyday life. “Sometimes ideas should be refined, but a lot of times we get too into trying to rationalize things, and we get really far down these rabbit holes,” he adds.
Back to the topic of “shark mind,” I also asked Reyes where the title of his third album comes from. He says it was one of those light bulb moments as he was trying to think of a succinct, monosyllabic title that was in line with the quick pointedness of the songs and the even-10-song tracklist. “The in-between time and not laboring the recording process, just doing it, having limited time—it kind of just called for a quick sharpness. When ‘Shark’ came to me, I thought that’s good.” He felt compelled to go with it despite having some initial doubt if the first title to come to mind was the right one (this is before he adopted the “no self-doubt” rule). His first instinct was further solidified when he and Julia went to Chris's Billiards in the Jefferson Park neighborhood, and she ended up snapping the photo that would later become the album cover. In it, Reyes’ glasses reflect the pool balls on the table in front of him, which brought the phrase “pool shark” to mind. Personally, I also think the July release date makes you think of swimming with sharks and the classic summer blockbuster about a shark: Jaws.
Reyes said he’s currently brainstorming some new merch to come along after the album’s release, and my vote goes to a shirt that mimics the original Jaws movie poster that just says “Shark.” Some of the songs on the album even have a cinematic quality about them, and Post Animal recently had their song “Setting Sun” from Iron included in the Devil Wears Prada 2 soundtrack. I asked Reyes if he were to have his solo music in a movie or tv show, which genre he’d like to sync up with. He’d love to work on any sort of movie, as long as it’s not against his beliefs— although he thinks Post Animal’s music would have been better suited for something subversive or indie, along the lines of tv shows Easy or High Maintenance, rather than the sequel of Devil Wears Prada. As for his future aspirations for his songwriting? “It'd be cool to soundtrack a documentary. Julia and I have been watching these Ken Burns documentaries. We were watching this Vietnam one, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross do the score,” he says.
Another one of my favorite tunes on Shark is the third track; “Whiff”— a jaunty and punchy number that makes you want to tap your feet and shimmy your hips. I couldn’t help but correlate the song title to Reyes’ infamous Instagram handle “StinkyJavi”. So naturally, I had to know what he considers to be his signature scent as well as the signature scent of Shark, as a project. For the latter, “Gingersnaps. Nag Champa. Baby powder,” he says. For Reyes himself, he considers himself to be of the Autumnal variety— “Definitely something cinnamon-y, something ginger-y. I’m just thinking about what is delicious to me.” Candlemakers of the world, this is your opportunity to do a collab with Javier Reyes and put out the “Stinky Javi” and “Shark” scent collection just in time for the fall! Or maybe Shark Girl Summer precedes Stinky Javi Autumn— but we can workshop it.
As for what’s actually in store for Javier Reyes next, he’s currently on tour with Djo and will be out on the road with Slow Pulp later this year. He says he’d love to eventually play a show with these new songs, so keep an eye on his Instagram (the aforementioned StinkyJavi) for updates. You can listen to Shark below in full.