Eric Jensen has spent the better part of two years writing songs about the things people carry silently, and with “You’re Not the Only One,” out August 14, 2026, the Minnesota based artist behind Waves of Defeat delivers his most direct statement yet. The song has been finished since February, but Jensen sat on it deliberately, waiting until the timing felt right for a track he considers one of the most important he has written.
Waves of Defeat has always been built around unflinching honesty, and “You’re Not the Only One” pushes that instinct further than ever. “I’ve always written about life’s hardest moments,” Jensen says. “The difference with this song is that I wanted to be as direct as possible because I think the topics deserve it.” The lyric names its subjects without softening them: “Anxiety, depression, we all fight it, we just don’t mention.” It’s a rare moment of plainspoken clarity in a genre that often reaches for metaphor, and that directness is entirely intentional.
The music matches that urgency. Where some of Jensen’s earlier material allows space to breathe, “You’re Not the Only One” keeps moving from beginning to end, built to mirror the relentlessness of the feelings it describes. “I wanted the intensity of the music to match the weight of the message,” he explains, a philosophy that runs through the entire Waves of Defeat catalogue and defines the project’s sound as much as any specific genre label could.
That mission has stayed remarkably consistent across more than a dozen independent singles released over the past year, each one circling back to the same core idea: that struggle is universal, even when it goes unspoken. The project’s own YouTube channel puts it plainly, describing Waves of Defeat as music about “anxiety, pressure, and the things people don’t talk about,” a mission statement that shows up as clearly in Jensen’s own words as it does in the songs themselves.
Jensen writes and produces every Waves of Defeat release himself from Elko New Market, Minnesota, operating independently through his own label, Waves of Defeat Records. That independence shapes everything about how the project moves. “I don’t write songs for radio,” he says. “I write songs I care about.” It’s an approach built entirely around connection rather than chart positioning, and one that has allowed Jensen to release music at a steady, prolific pace without ever losing sight of the emotional core driving it.
For Jensen, the goal has never been complicated. If someone hears Waves of Defeat and feels a little less alone, he says, then the song has already done exactly what it set out to do. “You’re Not the Only One” is his clearest attempt yet at making that connection, a song built for anyone who has fought anxiety or depression quietly and needed to hear that they aren’t fighting alone.
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