WE ARE WOLVES – “SÚPER NORMAL”
A SPILL EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREMIERE
Everything is on fire… The world lies in ruins…
We apologize for the delay: We Are Wolves have been building a bunker. We will provide a discount code for your stay. Take the batteries out of the smoke detector. Your spam folder is now your inbox. There are microplastics at the end of the rainbow. Everything is on fire. We Are Wolves have condemned the bunker—Go in.
Noting that we are living through an era of seismic change, conflict, and chaos is a tired observation at this point—but what else merits our attention? Most of us feel like we’re living in Upside-Down World, 24/7. On their sixth full-length album, Montreal’s We Are Wolves nevertheless try to imagine a future: one in which we dance through the inferno instead of succumbing to it. You can call it dystopian dance-rock (which it is), but really their new album is a magic spell inviting us to reimagine The End as merely a transition. It is entertainment for a brief period of chaos. The bunker is collapsing, but it’s going to be OK. Go in.
When Alexander Ortiz and Vincent Levesque arrived on the burgeoning early aughts Montreal music scene, their product was chaos. They were the contrarian magicians who would pull the tablecloth off a perfectly-set table simply to smash the dishes on the floor. Though they were constituted in the year 2000, at the beginning of the “rock’n’roll revival”, We Are Wolves sidestepped the trend: Instead of donning white belts and guitars and crafting concise, self-aware rock’n’roll songs, they dusted off unfashionable analogue synthesizers and drum machines, conjuring heavily rhythmical, primitive sounds overlayed with squelching synths and primal scream-therapy vocals. They imagined an alternate musical future that materialized a few years later with the dance/art/punk explosion, led by contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem, Liars, and Bloc Party. Over the subsequent two decades and five full-length albums and a few Eps, WAW have continued to operate outside trends, perfecting their unique brand of magique. States of confusion are cultivated. The bunker has vanished. Go in.
Now, in 2024, the duo of Alexander Ortiz and Vincent Levesque cast a spell for a sixth and final album. How does a band historically guided by contrarian impulses operate in the new, dizzyingly atomized global music scene? They somehow unsmashed the dishes, replaced them perfectly on the table, and slipped the tablecloth back under them—creating order out of chaos—by fashioning some of the sharpest and most concise songs in their catalogue, counterbalanced with their noisiest and most “out there” tracks. Featuring guitar contributions from A Place To Bury Strangers/Death By Audio’s Oliver Ackermann and Joseph Yarmush of SUUNS, We Are Wolves harness the sounds of synth rock, garage rock, cold wave, post punk, cumbia, tropical psych, and 90’s alt-rock, achieving a decades- and continents-straddling mixtape in which lyrical themes of confusion and alienation are tempered by the clarity of masterful pop craftsmanship. On this ultimate album, the band invites us into their bunker. Go in.
This new album, presented by the band’s longtime label Simone Records, was produced by the band themselves, and recorded in several places: at Death By Audio NYC with noise-master Oliver Ackermann of A Place To Bury Strangers; with esteemed producer Odin Parada while exiled in Mexico; and by Vincent and Alex in their studio. It was mixed in Montreal by engineer Adrian Popovich (SUUNS, DFA1979, Duchess Says).
We Are Wolves
[Single]
(Simone Records)
Release Date: July 17, 2024
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