If you’re in music, especially live music, living in the city of San Francisco can be a humongous fucking distraction. Since I moved here about 4 years ago I’ve probably averaged at least one show a week. There’s just too much music, so many awesome venues, so many great bands . . . and a lot of these acts are national, meaning local bands often fall by the wayside.

Seeing a local band usually means a few things; either you’re friends with someone in the band, you accidentally stumbled upon them on a random night or they’ve been around for a few years. Day Wave falls into the latter, but not in the original sense. Frontman Jackson Phillips has been on the scene for a minute – most notably with his old band Carousel.

But Day Wave, for me, is different. First of all, it’s a full band, which I’ve always been in the camp of “more is more.” That said, the band does a few things very well, one being that they actually sound like their recordings. Doesn’t that suck – when you show up to a band that sounds nothing like their album?! A sign of great producers, poor musicians.

Anywho, aside from their consistent sound, the music is just fucking happy, feel-good, “relax and chill” music. And they’re starting to really take off, having just finished up opening for Albert Hammond Jr, and are not slowing down. So catch them while you can folks, because these are by far my favorite local band of 2015.

Paul Chalker is a feature writer for the SF Critic, covering anything from rock, to bluegrass, to funk, to jam. With an embarrassing number of Widespread Panic shows under his belt, he’ll go to just about any show under the sun – except for the Flaming Lips. Or Drake.