Wax Underdogs

Wax Underdogs is Christian Berry, a songwriter in Melbourne, Florida. He writes slow, devotional folk-soul — Kipling, the Gospel of John, a Crimean Tatar lullaby — and renders it with AI, which he discloses on every release. The Watchfires EP arrives in late 2026.

Wax Underdogs is the songwriting project of Christian Berry, who spent six years in Ukraine and Crimea, trained as a translator, and now works in technical publications in Melbourne, Florida. The songs are slow and lyric-forward, and they keep returning to the same subject: what a person holds onto when there is nothing left to hold.

The debut single, "Hold," adapts Kipling's "If—" into a survival song with a chorus that isn't in the poem. "Anam" is sung in Crimean Tatar, built on a lullaby chorus carried in his wife Elvira's family's oral tradition. "Kneel" draws on the traditional Ubi caritas and the foot-washing in John 13; "Let Not Your Heart" on John 14.

Berry writes the words and the underlying music and renders the recordings with Suno. He discloses this on every release, in the credits and in the copy, and has been public about getting the attribution wrong on the first pass and correcting it.

"I write the lyrics and the underlying music — the chord progression, the structure — and I record that before the session. Suno renders it: the sung melody, the lead guitar, the voice, the instrumentation.

I disclose it everywhere because the alternative is that somebody finds out. I also got the credits wrong on the first release and had to correct them publicly. The line between writing something and prompting something is harder to draw than people arguing about it seem to think, and I'd rather be precise about mine than defensive about it."