Wunderhorse takes the lead

Champion’s story reminds me of Togo, the sled dog who undertook similar press tours of duty after saving the village of Nome, Alaska, from a diphtheria outbreak by running serum through an ice storm. Togo and his handler would greet fans at malls and department stores; they even appeared in adverts for Lucky Strike cigarettes. If they could’ve talked, Togo and Champion, I wonder what they would have said about life on the road, as performers, making money for other people.

“It’s crippling us very slowly, but that’s okay; it comes with the territory,” Jacob Slater shrugs of Wunderhorse’s touring schedule. That’s Wunderhorse the band – a solo project turned egalitarian foursome about to release its bigger, brasher, better second album, Midas. If someone has the Midas touch, anything they touch turns to gold, and many of Slater’s lyrics can be interpreted as a commentary on the Champion-esque lifestyle of a touring band.

“Why the fuck should I keep up appearances?” he laments through the menacing distortion of “July”, the meanest sounding track in their catalogue. The shuffling anti-lullaby “Silver” (the closest this album comes to the radio-friendly “Purple” of their debut) dares spectators to “Fill me up with silver and I’ll sing one just for you.”

“I am kind of joking,” Slater continues, “but once you spend enough time on the road, you leave a bit of yourself there when you come back. You adopt almost a new way of being so you can deal with the fact that it’s a very unusual way to behave and a very usual daily thing to be doing: sitting around the van for hours and hours and then expending a huge amount of energy for one hour. And then coming down – you have to change to be able to do that, and that makes it weird when you come back.”

Wunderhorse have gone the distance over the last two years. Their debut album Cub was lauded as one of 2022’s best, its earworm singalongs, unruly guitar noise and beautifully twisted lyrics resonating from small clubs to arenas populated by bucket hat-donned Sam Fender fans chanting that “she dreams purple and anger”. A consequence of all this attention is that they hadn’t any time to regroup and reflect before being packed off to the Minnesotan woods to record new music. “Leading up to the recording, it was a little turbulent, and we weren’t fully prepared; that ended up working in our favour,” says lead guitarist Harry Tristan Fowler, the last to join the quartet (“the missing piece of the puzzle,” according to drummer Jamie Staples).

Slater is succinct about the recording process: “It had to happen so it did happen.”

Even so, Midas doesn’t feel undercooked. Unlike Cub, which was outlined by Slater before the others got involved, absent the serendipity of four people spitballing ideas, Midas allows the members to employ road-worn techniques and new approaches: playing it as it lays, falling back on the unspoken musical language that develops as you spend every day in close quarters.

The result is an album that epitomises the real Wunderhorse. In many ways, it’s their Colour and the Shape moment – the album where the solo project becomes a team effort, where the curious cub grows into a towering grizzly. (At this point, drawing comparisons to one of the biggest stadium bands in the world feels less silly than premonitory).

“So much of who we are has been chiselled out from our live performance, because that’s how this band came to be,” explains Slater, “and I don’t think the nature of our live performances was reflected in Cub. It’s much more polished and better produced than we sound live. It’s good to do that on your first record and look back and think, ‘What would we do the same? What would we do differently?’ It gives you somewhere to go.”

Where they did go, in a literal sense, was Pachyderm Studios – legendary incubator of records by PJ Harvey, Babes In Toyland and Nirvana – where they worked with producer Craig Silvey. Silvey’s uber-mainstream CV (including Florence + the Machine, Arcade Fire and the literal Rolling Stones) belies the fact that he evidently understood Wunderhorse, enabling them to follow their do-it-on-the-night philosophy. “Limiting things we had to distract ourselves helped us to create the attitude and the aim for the album,” bassist Pete Woodin explains. “I don’t think we’ll ever have a chance to make a record like that ever again,” Fowler suggests. “People will be too terrified to trust us again, but it worked [this] time. For some reason.”

The guitarist elaborates, recalling that, upon arriving in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, they decided to toss out most of the songs earmarked for the album: “Half of it was written in the studio and it was this, I don’t wanna say fluke, but there are times in the creative journey where you have an opportunity to do something on this whim – this weird opportunity that’s there for you – and you’re not gonna be prepared for it, but that will ultimately work in your favour.”

In terms of flukey imperfections, there’s the false start to “Rain”, for example, or the way Slater’s voice cracks during “Superman”, or the entirety of “Midas”, a warm-up performance that became the final cut. Four fast-changing open chords form the crux of the title track, but Slater plays them as if furiously attempting to dislodge all that digested silver, diving into each chord shape, choking the strings, making them wince under his authority. His bandmates soon pile in: Fowler’s serrated, trebly guitar shrieks at Woodin and Staples, who provide the unflinching backbone. The song ended up unlocking “the sonic blueprint for the record,” Slater says. “Once that ball was rolling, it was like, ‘Right, we know what we’re doing now – we’ve got something we can actually get our teeth into.’”

It makes perfect sense to keep a live take when you consider that all of these songs were performed on stage numerous times before being released – something Wunderhorse have always done but now has the complication of making stakeholders sweat.

“People give us a hard time about playing the new songs before the album’s out,” Slater admits, “but that’s just who we are – we all grew up playing live when we were young, and obviously when you’re kids, you haven’t got a record deal, you haven’t got that world around you. If you write a new song then you play it that night. I think we enjoy carrying that forward into this new environment that we find ourselves in. I personally don’t see any reason why that should change.”

Woodin is right with him: “Way back on one of the Fontaines D.C. tours, we pretty much finished what we thought the parts would be for “Arizona”, and the next day we played it on stage to see how it would feel.” They’ve played it near-enough every night since.

Tracks such as “Arizona”, a hooky, mid-tempo altrocker, and “Superman”, the profound, steadily crescendoing heart of the album, will be familiar to fans, already cemented as live anthems. But one of the lesser-played tracks – twice according to setlist.fm – is “Aeroplane”, eight minutes of entrancing, languid ambling that leads the album to a softly sinister touchdown.

“We wanted it to sound like the subject of the song: this broken thing that’s barely holding itself together,” says Slater, referring to the grounded, disused aeroplane with the “broken wings and busted windows”, the topic of the lyrics. Fowler recalls that it was Silvey, their producer, who suggested “there needs to be something to offset the prettiness” – “To link it to the rest of the album as well,” Woodin adds. Enter Fowler’s dirty, deconstructed guitar solo, an uncoordinated expression of id. “I remember laying down in the studio, closing my eyes, and hoping whatever was happening was gonna work,” he says. “Sometimes shredding can feel a little embarrassing, so doing something like that, I was pretty proud actually.”

Everyone has their part, though: Slater’s downcast storytelling; Woodin’s thin, poky Danelectro bass keeping everyone upright as Staples’ limping snare hits flutter and fall, never quite taking flight. The way the four of them converse during this sprawling coda – and in general during our conversation – evidences how interlaced their ideas and aims are for Wunderhorse. Fowler is reminded of Brian Eno’s word “scenius”, derived from the word genius. Eno’s definition references the Russian Revolution and includes words such as “ecology” and “curators”, but Fowler translates it as “a collective having a common goal means it creates something with the depth that not one person can make.”

So while we may pity Champion the Wonder Horse – his lack of autonomy, his sidekick status – Wunderhorse the band are doing okay: they have everything they need.