Album Stream: Strange Wilds – ‘Subjective Concepts’

Furious hellfire from the Pacific North-West...

The Pacific North-West remains isolated.

Sure, the sounds of Seattle and Portland may well have conquered the globe, but the scene there remains entirely, utterly detached.

Olympia based hardcore trio Strange Wilds are a case in point. The band's sludge-driven moments hark back to those early Sub Pop gems, but there's a furious modernism underneath their Big Muff riffs.

Taut, virile hardcore punk with a seething intelligence, debut album 'Subjective Concepts' arrives this week via (where else?) Sub Pop. It's an absolute gem.

All killer no filler, Strange Wilds are aware of their influences but have the confidence/temerity to mess around with them. Allen (drums) explains:

"I don’t think we want to carry the torch or emulate that stuff; this is where that music didn’t stop, it’s been going on through all these different punk and hardcore bands and alternative and weird rock bands and this is kind of where it is right now. Northwest hardcore is very different; because it’s so isolated, it’s easy for that petri dish to stay there. You still have that grunge influence in that petri dish, but there’s just a lot more stuff in it now. And I guess we’re in there now, too."

Check it out now, then find a track-by-track guide written by Strange Wilds below.

Pronoia
Ah, the first track. I wrote that main riff more than a year before we recorded this record, and even then I was like "This needs to be at the beginning of a record". This actually might have been the first song we worked on as a band for the record. There was supposed to be a guitar solo in the bridge part but everything I was coming up with sounded like shit, so we just went the a shoe-gazey anti-solo guitar thing. It was the last song we recorded though at Robert Lang Studios, Allen was so wrecked from drumming for two days straight that he thought we'd have to scrap it.

Starved For
This was the first song Allen brought to the table. Me and Sean were super stoked on it. It has such a different feeling then what we had been writing up to that point. I must of done like 4 or 5 different guitar tracks for the bridge part to get that real atmospheric sound. Those soft sounding vocals during the bridge are all Allen.

Autothysis
This is another one that was quite different than the rest of our material up to this point. I wanted to write a song though that went from being real quiet and poppy to heavy and loud. Allen again did the softer backup vocals in the beginning, and then he did the screams at the end. And so you don't have to look up what the definition of the title is, it's when an animal, usually insect, blows itself apart by rupturing their insides.

Don't Have To
This is the slow jammer of the record. There isn't a lot to say about it. It was pretty hard to get the vocals to sound right though. Took me a few sessions to get them where I thought they sounded decent.

Egophillia
From slow to fast and heavy. Worked out well enough. I think we banged this one out in one take actually.

Oneirophobe
Oneirophobe is a fear of dreams. This turned out to be quite a long song, I really enjoy the bridge though. There were a lot of cool sounds that ended up happening. I especially like the palm muted/harmonic tones that came out. That was a happy accident from doing like five different guitar takes and me just fucking around on each one.

Disdain
This was another one Allen brought in. I was super into it right away because it just reminded me of Devo so much. I'm not sure if it still sounds like Devo now, but it did when we first started playing it. I wanted to do that old punk thing and just do one guitar track and pan it to one side and bass to the other, it kind of got mixed a little different than that. I also decided to change the solo up after we recorded the basic tracks so we did two different takes for the solo. That's why they sound so much different than the rest of the song.

Pareidolia
I was really excited to come up with the verse riff for this song, but it's really hard to play. I think I was listening to a lot of Bad Brains at the time and so I just wrote something that I thought sounded complicated and similar to them.

Terrible
We really liked the transition between the last song and this one. It sounds like we just played them both straight through when recording. That's Allen doing the other vocals in the outro.

Lost And Found
Another song that was a big departure for us. When I wrote the main riff I thought it was so catchy that I figured it'd be best to use it for almost the whole song. We wrote the bridge part as a band, I think Allen pretty much came up with the riff though. It reminds me a lot of Slint. The little fret buzz right before it gets loud was completely by accident. I remember right as it happened I was like "How the fuck did I just do that?"

Outercourse
I like this track a lot, we've been closing our live set with it as of late. It's always good to end a set with a real noisy one that falls apart at the end. I think I had been listening to TAD a whole lot when I was writing the riffs for this one, it's got a sort of TAD feel to it. Thanks for listening!

– – –

'Subjective Concepts' will be released on July 24th.

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