"[1] Music critics like Alex Ross of The New Yorker—and Adams himself—have described Dark Waves as a stylist precursor to the composer's Pulitzer Prize for Music-winning 2013 composition Become Ocean.
"[5] However, Mike Dunham of Alaska Dispatch News remarked, "It was said that the winning composition, Become Ocean, a 40-minute cosmos of sound for three orchestras, had its genesis with Dark Waves, a short piece premiered by the Anchorage Symphony in 2007.
I'm not sure I get a direct connection, but Adams' music may be generally sorted into two categories: the noisy, heavily percussive pieces and the more atmospheric, dreamy and even melodic works.
[1] The music critic Alex Ross called Dark Waves "one of the most arresting American orchestral compositions of recent years," adding, "it suggests a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes.
Every instrument is, in one way or another, playing with the simple interval of the perfect fifth—the basic building block of harmony—but at the climax lines coalesce into roaring dissonances, with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounding together.
"[2] In 2014, Andrew Clements of The Guardian described it as "effectively a dark, compact precursor of the monumental Becoming Ocean [sic], with which Adams won a Pulitzer prize earlier this year."
He added, "It's an 11-minute span combining layers of electronic and orchestral sound that move in and out of phase to generate a gigantic climax and then subside, all done with such subtlety and sophistication..."[7] Ivan Hewett of The Daily Telegraph similarly said it "offered a model of how a vastly ambitious expressive intent can be captured exactly, in a form as succinct as a Haydn minuet.