Wishy Boldly Embraces Love and Absurdity in Ecstatic Shoegaze of ‘Nature’s Pill’
Cover art for Nature’s Pill
A sophomore album is often an inflection point: It can consolidate and elevate a band’s identity, or it can fail to meet the lofty expectations its predecessor set before it. Wishy establishes themselves firmly in the former category with their excellent second LP, Nature’s Pill, an alt-rock collage of modernity and its vagaries. Released on Friday, the record is exhilarating, strange, and kinetic — a raucous examination of feeling and farce in an increasingly senseless world.
The Indianapolis five-piece embodies the best of shoegaze: angst and ecstasy, woven together by intoxicating guitar riffs and bone-vibrating drum loops. Often compared to bands like Slow Pulp and Soccer Mommy, Wishy’s music just as often pays homage to their ’90s dream-pop predecessors as to their contemporary indie peers. In Nature’s Pill in particular, you’ll hear the echoes of The Sundays, The Cranberries, and other indie rockers of the ’90s and ’00s.
Throughout their new 12-track album, the band’s dual vocalists and songwriters, Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter, trade off the lead mic with ease, their voices complementing, and never overpowering, each other (unsurprising, perhaps, given the two have been collaborators since high school). They are joined by guitarist Dimitri Morris, bassist Mitch Collins, and drummer Conner Host.
Nature’s Pill begins with “All the Rage,” a strong opening statement for the project. Krauter and Pitchkites sing, “So fuck doing the dishes / Fuck these clothes on my floor / … I don’t care anymore now that you’re gone,” lyrics that are in stark contrast to the jangly melody that gets your blood pumping. This song, like the album as a whole, doesn’t shy away from having fun right there in the drudgery of heartbreak, and that’s exactly what makes it so compelling.
The two tracks that follow, “Covergirl” and “Sensational,” are some of the catchiest on the album, and showcase Wishy’s deft use of addictive guitar hooks combined with distorted, wall-of-sound production that would be right at home in the world of ’90s shoegaze and pop rock. Indeed, the guitar line of “Sensational” feels like a nod to songs like “Connection” by Elastica, and both tracks have a cheekiness to them that you just can’t resist.
Wishy (photo by Rian Archer, courtesy of Terrorbird Media)
“Shift” is a grunge-rock track about cajoling another person (or perhaps the singer themselves) into going to a party on a Friday night, a message which reaches a frantic zenith with the repetition of “I love it, I want it / And another, and another” for eight couplets. It’s a song concerned with social pressure and performativity, as Krauter sings, “If it’s all just vanity / Is it really happening?” “Shift” is cut off suddenly by a voicemail from Pitchkites’ grandmother, an outro that offers a refreshing respite from the intensity of the preceding lyrics and dark, distorted melody.
Then Wishy dives right back in with “You’re Not Serious,” an apt song title for a band interested in the absurd, the zany, and the contradictory. This up-tempo, thrumming track is laden with enigmatic lyrics with an arguably Icarian throughline, which once again points to Wishy’s interest in crafting music that is expansive rather than purely confessional.
What follows are two softer, dreamier tracks: “Mona Lisa” and “Lovesick.” “Mona Lisa” is a sweet and apologetic love song, accompanied by softer drums and guitars, and “Lovesick” is the album’s lead single — and one of Off the Record’s picks for the song of the summer.
Listening to “Lovesick,” you’ll feel as if you’ve stepped back in time to the heart-swelling dream pop of the ’90s along the lines of the Cocteau Twins with a heavy dose of The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love.” Blending bright, open guitar chords with an up-tempo beat and soaring, dreamy vocals, this track embodies the bewitching combination of joy and nausea that so often defines summer love: too sweet, too hot, and, as Wishy sings, so right yet so wrong (“Don’t the right words always seem so wrong?”).
Watch the official video for “Lovesick” on YouTube.
Wishy peppers Nature’s Pill with eclectic cultural and personal references — from Cleopatra, the “Mona Lisa,” and “Hocus Pocus” to voicemails from band members’ grandmothers — like a pinboard laden with the “banal detritus of human experience,” to borrow the band’s aphorism. “Freak 99” is the perfect example of this purposefully disjointed, jagged energy that feels as intriguing as it is disconcerting. Krauter and Pitchkites return to talk-singing on this track and are accompanied by jangly, sharp guitars, with the latter slipping into a distorted scream that melds well with the fuzzed-out radio static in the background. For the strange cherry on top, Wishy closes out each chorus with some French (“petit joie de vivre, alright”).
“Blitz” is the album’s frenetic climax, with a beat like a panicked heart and a guitar line that will have you hitting replay again and again. A true rock track, it also has one of the standout lyrics of the album — lines that are emblematic of the project’s acerbic humor and commentary on modernity: “Don’t need answers / already got the t-shirt.”
Nature’s Pill is a 12-track feast for the ears — a haze of bubbly rock infused with the perfect hint of nostalgia. It’s a project full of feeling, yet it never lets its subject matter be flattened into the morose or saccharine. This record is replete with juxtapositions — humor and apathy, nostalgia and existential dread, vanity and love — but it doesn’t offer a message so overwrought as “find the joy in the chaos.” Instead, Nature’s Pill is a kind of scrapbook of the world’s incoherence, and Wishy, rather than trying to glean some tired cliché from the mire, sits right there in the mud and turns their gaze to the sun, “’cause tomorrow could be gray skies.”
Wishy begins their headline tour across North America in Indianapolis on Saturday.
