wave stu might just be the platonic ideal of icy, emotionally fraught synth-pop. on his debut release for origin peoples, stockholm-based musician michel isorinne puts paragons of this style like orchestral manoeuvres in e dark in his slipstream. laced with spoken-word passages from films and television shows, wave stu weaves a loose tale about the nature of time, physics, and mortality that can be summarized by the key phrase, uttered by a woman scientist somewhere throughout the album, magic is in the molecules.