Content:
Wallows are riding high on confidence and creativity with their third album ‘Model’, a lean, mean indie-pop machine that showcases their growth as a band.
Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Derek Bremner.
Grooming: Chloe Rose.
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It’s a few days before they’re set to release their third album ‘Model’, and Wallows are holed up in a little Islington studio with Dork. Our shoot and chat are squeezed in between two album outstores on a trip so whistle-stop that we actually end up bringing the boys coffee on our way up to meet them before they head off to New York the next day (to their amusement at 4:20pm).
It’s hard to tell whether it’s the jet lag or some cliché laidback California attitude, but Wallows are pretty relaxed about the many moving parts spinning around them; if anything, it’s that go-go-go lifestyle that’s influenced the sound and ethos of ‘Model’ more than anything else.
“With this record, we were operating on instincts and this ‘first idea, best idea’ thing. That’s how we work,” explains Cole Preston, Wallows’ drummer (and the rest) and middle child. “But I think the foundation of it is that we’re just way more experienced. We are more comfortable in these scenarios, and because of that, we’re able to push ourselves forward and make something that sounds like who we are right now.”
‘Model’ crash lands into the start of summer with a decidedly more immediate sound, feel and approach. The boys came into its creation with the goal of making some leaner, meaner songs and achieve exactly that. There’s none of the fumbling self-discovery of debut ‘Nothing Happens’, nor any of the detours or much of the instrumental experimentation follow-up ‘Tell Me That It’s Over’ brought forth.
Instead, ‘Model’ coasts through a plethora of 2000s indie references throughout its pacy twelve tracks and winds up being, contrary to the title, a little bit imperfect.
“There’s definitely an irony to the title intentionally,” says frontman and baby of the band Dylan Minnette. “There’s plenty of reasons we could unpack, but that definitely applies” – there’s a very jet-lagged consideration of the word ‘applicable’ for a moment – “to the title and how the music is performed and recorded.”
“We didn’t have time to overthink things,” adds Braeden Lemasters, Wallows’ second-in-command and the eldest of the trio, “because we recorded for two months, and we recorded 25 songs. It’s kind of impossible to overthink that way because you’re just working on hyperspeed. As soon as you’re finished with one idea, you work on the next and then that space gives you the context when you return to it to see it in a different way, versus if you’re just constantly working on something for too long.”
“We didn’t have time to overthink things”
Braeden Lemasters
As a result, the record cuts straight to the feeling. Riding high following their post-pandemic tour and festival run, the boys approached the record with both wide-eyed optimism and a newfound confidence. Speed running the recording process, they estimate only seven songs were left on the cutting room floor.
“I wrote lyrics simultaneously with recording because I made myself work under pressure again,” says Dylan. “I was really happy, very in love, just on cloud nine. I feel like the best version of myself right now; that’s the mentality I had. That reflects in some of the lyrics that I wrote: more playful, light on his feet and stuff like that. We were all feeling good. As a band, we felt free. We felt very creative and open and inspired, confident in our abilities of what we could create, and we were impressing ourselves.”
“I was looking forward to going in every day, which I think is how it’s always been for us,” adds Cole. “But this time definitely felt like, if I look back at my life as a whole, that was the start of a time where I was like, things have fallen into place in my life in a way. I think we’re very fortunate in that that’s what we all were experiencing.”
The album’s sound also lends itself well to the live performance because it was largely informed by both the tour they’d been on in support of ‘Tell Me That It’s Over’ and knowing they were going on a huge tour this year. While nothing was written on the road, Cole noting that tour time usually feels like the spoils of the work rather than a time to do more, it meant coming into the studio for ‘Model’ was the first time Wallows were thinking about how a record would sound in arenas.
“With ‘Nothing Happens’, we were just focusing on making our first album, we weren’t thinking about shows really, just stoked to play it,” Dylan says. “Then ‘Tell Me That It’s Over’, especially because we were making it at the top of 2021, so that whole process, I don’t think we were thinking about live shows at all, we didn’t know when we’d be playing live again. But this was like, we need to make sure that this album can be played in a big room, and it needs to be exactly for that moment, you know?”
The ‘Model’ tour is Wallows’ biggest yet, seeing them head up iconic venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden and Los Angeles’ Forum, while their European tour will conclude with a night at Alexandra Palace. Despite this, it was the early riotous club shows of 2000s indie bands that the boys find themselves calling back to.
“I can only imagine going to clubs in the early 2000s; Arctic Monkeys or Libertines shows here would have been so insane,” says Dylan. “Just judging on how incredible UK crowds are, I can only imagine these artists when they were in their prime and what that felt like, even seeing American bands like Kings of Leon, The Strokes, stuff like that would have been insane.”
‘Model’ slides comfortably into that sweet category of records that’d sound equally as good in a low-ceilinged, sweaty basement club as it would in a festival field. Its directness feels borrowed from early Monkeys records like ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’ and Strokes albums like ‘Is This It’ and ‘Room On Fire’; both the album and the band themselves feel spiritually pretty British in the way The Killers or Kings of Leon do, those groups discographies gleefully adopted by football fans and favoured by Reading & Leeds bookers.
Still, there are flourishes of Wallows’ more playful and experimental side, this time around in a way that feels naturally woven into the jangly, sunny, indie pop they’ve become best known for; ‘Model’ wears the band’s long-time love for Vampire Weekend and The Beatles on its sleeve.
“There will always be songs that sound like what someone would imagine us sounding like,” says Cole, “like the song ‘Calling After Me’, I think is a song where someone would be like, oh, yeah. There’s always going to be a layer of that in some songs. But like, I also think we’re excited by being a little bit experimental.”
“I don’t know if we have a particular sound, but there’s a particular feeling and way of writing,” adds Dylan. “It’s the same gift in different packages. It’s ever-changing, but we’re always gonna try to evoke the same feeling from people.”
“I was really happy, very in love, just on cloud nine”
Dylan Minnette
Braeden pulls out Phoenix, New Order, Cleaners From Venus and Alvvays as additional references, while Dylan adds The Clash to finish a list of their main five. The common thread between many of Wallows’ influences – particularly the British ones – is their ability to shapeshift and move through genres fearlessly, something the boys are undoubtedly set on doing themselves.
They’re seven years into releasing music as Wallows, but Dylan, Braeden and Cole’s friendship goes back way further. Dylan and Braeden met as kids, their mothers connecting on a forum for parents with child actors, and picked up Cole along the way when they all participated in a music program called Join The Band (sort of a musician matchmaking service). The duo was assigned Cole as their drummer in 2009, and the rest is history. In that time, the band dynamics have shifted considerably, with each member picking up more instruments and rotating positions within the group.
“In the beginning of the band, mainly Dylan and I wrote the songs and ideas,” Braeden explains, “and then maybe a year into the band, Cole started writing a lot.” Similar to the way their heroes Lennon and McCartney worked, with Mr Harrison popping up later? “Yeah, exactly, exactly.”
“I remember you showing us ‘These Days’,” Braeden says to Cole, talking about Wallows’ first official Pres-song (sorry), “and then like, parts started sort of happening, lead parts of this and that, and now it’s literally 100% equal songwriting across the board. Cole’s bringing ideas just as much as anyone. That’s the thing that’s changed the most about Wallows that I wouldn’t even have predicted because originally Cole just drummed, and now you play guitar and keyboard and have all these ideas.”
Maybe Cole has been the under-appreciated genius of Wallows all along, with Dylan prodding that he’d kicked off their biggest streaming hit ‘Are You Bored Yet?’. “You’re the George [Harrison] of Wallows,” he suggests.
“Cole plays way more on ‘Model’ than I do,” Dylan adds.
“’She’s An Actress’, I don’t play on that,” says Braeden. “They Tears for Fears’d that one. I was taking a nap, and Cole just recorded all the guitar parts and all the synths, and I was like, cool, sounds good.”
“Always a little bit of a tinge of guilt when I say that’s my favourite one,” says Dylan.
Of course, no one stays in a band – or even friends – for over a decade without sharing a mindset and outlook on the direction of the group. For ‘Model’, were they bringing the same ideas to the studio?
“It’s a yes and no, and I think that’s what makes Wallows, us,” says Braeden. “We all get on the same page, but naturally, our opinions and ideas of an album change, and then that changes someone else’s view of the album, and then that finds what it ends up being.”
Dylan adds, “Give us a long enough passionate conversation and it’s easy to get on the same page about something.”
“I enjoy the feeling of us having ideas,” says Cole. “I guess we just batted around stuff, and then it arrived somewhere; it’s been really fun, and we’re lucky that we have that.”
The familiarity within the trio extends beyond the band for ‘Model’, as they recruited John Congleton as a producer again. First linking up for their debut EP and major label release ‘Spring’ in 2018, John has been crucial to developing the Wallows sound and honouring the band’s ideas.
A legendary producer with credits across the last two decades of indie, he was the first ‘known’ (Cole’s words) producer Wallows had wanted to work with, and he was happy to oblige. John ended up working heavily on ‘Nothing Happens’ and maintained his relationship with the boys, even though they ditched him for (the equally legendary) Ariel Rechtshaid on ‘Tell Me That It’s Over’.
“He’ll always have this very special place in the history of our band,” says Cole, who speaks about John sort of like a favourite teacher, “That was like a transitional period, suddenly we were working with John and he taught us so much. So when we were writing for ‘Model’, we set up a session with him; we hadn’t seen him in a while, and we were just gonna write a song. We started talking about what’s next for us and just asked him, what do you think our next record should be? And everything he said about how it’s a moment in our career and it should be more lean and mean, and everything he was saying was what we were thinking. So it just felt right.”
He continues, “There’s a level of comfort because we have worked with him already, but I also think that he’s the kind of person to challenge us, and he, just as much as us, knows where we’ve been as a band because he literally was there for it. That sort of enables you to actually understand it and push it forward; you can take what you’ve built with somebody and go further into that.”
“I can only imagine going to clubs in the early 2000s; Arctic Monkeys or Libertines shows here would have been so insane”
Dylan Minnette
Throughout our chat, Dylan keeps nodding to the next era of Wallows (already!!) and the ideas they’re having about what comes next. A semi-spoken agreement with John suggests he won’t be coming back for album four, as they’ve collectively decided it’s better for him to do every other Wallows record.
“I feel like, in a weird way, if we only worked with the three or four producers we’ve ever met in the career of our band, I’d be happy with that,” Braeden says. “I don’t need to keep searching for a grass is greener feeling unless I creatively wanted to.”
Still, while ‘Model’ might be the Wallows sound of right now, one that relishes in being content in the moment and thrives on the familiarity and closeness of its participating creators, there’s a solid chance it’ll change. Dylan mentions they’re having the same feelings again on the route they’ll be taking next, assuring it’ll be a total turn from where they’re at now.
And that’s not shocking at all. Looking at their appreciation for the weird and wonderful aspects of their favourite bands – take the fact that Dylan’s favourite Beatles album is ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ – and admiration for acts whose career paths involve several sharp turns – Braeden notes how iconic Arctic Monkeys shift from ‘AM’ to ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ was – and a picture of what’s next comes slightly into focus.
Where ‘Model’ leaves Wallows is in a new place of fearlessness and self-assurance.
“I love that they never looked back,” says Dylan of Arctic Monkeys’ multiple switch-ups. His own band probably won’t, either. ■
Taken from the July 2024 issue of Dork. Wallows’ album ‘Model’ is out now.
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