There comes a moment in any relationship where you realise you’re a ‘thing’. You’re no longer just seeing someone; you’re actually an item. For indie four-piece Wunderhorse, something similar happened on tour last year. The project had previously been a solo endeavour helmed by singer Jacob Slater, his bandmates hired hands who helped out onstage and in the studio.
“The more we played together and did the hard yards doing the gigs and stuff,” Jacob explains, “a natural chemistry sort of came about.”
So guitarist Harry Fowler, drummer Jamie Staples and bassist Pete Woodin saddled up to embark on ‘Midas’, the group’s sprawling new album, an anguished and alienated record that’s more immediate and raw than its compact predecessor, 2022’s ‘Cub’. In a King’s Cross cafe on a quiet Tuesday morning, alongside Fowler and Staples, the frontman reflects: “I feel stronger being part of a sort of strange dysfunctional family going up onstage, rather than that dynamic of: ‘Oh, here I am and here’s the session guys.’ That always felt wrong. I never saw them as that, anyway, because they’re my friends.”
NME dubbed ‘Cub’ an album of the year, praising its “grit and energy”, but Slater now dismisses its neat, “cookie-cut” songs. He wrote the record alone and reckons it lacks the spontaneity of what is technically the second Wunderhorse album. “I think we all feel like ‘Midas’ feels like our debut,” says Harry.
Wunderhorse, all in their mid-to-late-twenties, have been in each other’s orbits for years. They partly met at gigs in London and their native Hertfordshire, though Slater and Fowler have been pals since they were 14. The former had won a scholarship to a top school but was “asked to leave” due to truancy: “I just hated it. I felt so disconnected. You know that feeling in your gut when you know you’re in just totally the wrong place?”
Slater then joined Fowler’s school and, recalls the singer, “We bonded over a shared animosity of everyone else there. And a love of music ‘cause everyone else thought we were nuts because we liked Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam and Nirvana.” Together, ensconced in the music department, they’d watch Pearl Jam’s incendiary 1992 performance at Pinkpop Festival on repeat. “It was better than Geography,” Slater quips.
Those influences have seeped into ‘Midas’, which exudes an intensity that seems to prove ‘90s grunge will never lose its appeal. “We didn’t just listen to that music – it was a world that we got lost in,” says Fowler, who goes on to speculate, fairly, that “a hundred years from now a kid’s still gonna be listening to ‘School’ by Nirvana. I can’t see how that’s ever gonna be irrelevant ever again to a human being.”
On ‘July’, the album’s most devastating track, these formative sounds coalesce into a tornado of riffage, with Slater declaring “I’m ready to die” as cymbals crash apocalyptically around him. The song, he says, came from “a pretty dark place” as “lots of shitty things happened in my personal world”.
The band tiptoe euphemistically around this subject, though Slater alludes to something “horrible” that affected the group, as well as his “own stuff that got a bit out of hand” when they were on tour last year: “You’re going 200 miles an hour and you don’t hear the fucking wheels rattling.”
“I think how we were touring on top of stuff that was going on,” agrees Staples, “was a factor as well.”
“Without going into too much detail,” Fowler adds carefully, “there were… professional difficulties. We were burning the candle at both ends, basically.”
“The more we did the hard yards doing gigs, a natural chemistry came about” – Jacob Slater
Wunderhorse are hardly the first band to encounter these perils. In his 2022 book Bodies, music journalist Ian Winwood explores the many ways in which “the music industry makes people ill”. Specifically, he looks at how touring can lead to burnout, addiction and mental illness. The band aren’t familiar with the book, but recognise its premise immediately: “Well, it kills people, doesn’t it,” Slater says matter-of-factly.
The book recognises a ray of light in the form of contemporary acts, such as Sam Fender and Yard Act, who acknowledged warning signs and cancelled shows in order to recuperate. Wunderhorse did just this last summer when they pulled a string of seemingly enviable US gigs and festival slots. Slater recalls speaking to a musician who received a lot of stick for making a similar move a decade ago: “Quite a short time later, when us or any other bands are pulling some shows, you’re just getting a lot of love from people being like, ‘Hope you’re OK’, which is great. No-one needs extra shit on top of what they’re already [experiencing].”
After all, it’s not as if being in a successful band is a sure-fire route to financial security anymore: both Woodin and Staples have part-time jobs (the former is absent today because he has a shift in a café). Faced with these challenges, the quartet have quite literally banded together. “You have to look out for each other,” says Slater, “because no-one else is going to. It’s a really cut-throat industry. It seems really happy-clappy, everyone holding hands and supporting each other. But there’s a lot of crocodile smiles.”
“The fucking celebrity machine just makes everybody feel depressed and stupid” – Jacob Slater
Still, he prefers it to the TV industry, with which he had a brief dalliance when he played drummer Paul Cook in Danny Boyle’s 2022 Sex Pistols drama Pistol, his first and perhaps last acting role. “You think the music world is insincere?” he laughs. “You wait until you get in the acting world. You don’t know who’s your friend and who wants to fucking steal your kidneys.” He met some “great people” through the experience, but despised the “fucking celebrity machine, which just makes everybody feel depressed and stupid… Some of the best acting you’ll ever see is on red carpets and not on the fucking [screen], you know?”
It was like being in that scholarship school, he now realises: “The feeling followed me around that I’m not where I’m meant to be. It’s a gut feeling: ‘This is wrong; I’m not the guy. This is not me.’”
Wunderhorse, though, clearly feels like home. In an email to NME, Woodin explains that their spring 2022 US tour was overwhelming and intense (“it’s enough to make anyone go a bit mad to be honest”) but marked a major turning point for the band: “We got each other through it and that was the beginning for me of us becoming a musical unit not just as friends, but sharing a vision of pushing this project as far as it can possibly go.”
Later this year, they’ll embark on their biggest UK and Ireland tour to date – then head out across Europe to support Fontaines D.C., with whom they’ve toured before. “We got to watch them play every night,” recalls Staples. “They had a show that was a bit more well-rounded than ours, so we were seeing how it was done.”
This is the kind of united front that Wunderhorse have harnessed on ‘Midas’, and which you imagine will carry over onto its eventual follow-up. They’re always writing bits and pieces, but Harry says album three is “still a mystery” as they wait patiently for its aesthetic to emerge. “You know in your gut,” concludes Slater, “when things start coming together.”
Wunderhorse’s ‘Midas’ is out August 30 via Communion