San Diego psych-rock outfit Wild Wild Wets returned on Friday with the band’s third full-length studio effort, Love Always. Out now via the band’s own Yeah Yeah Blah Blah label, the nine-track collection hears the band creep out of basement psychedelia and embrace the sunlight.
Fronted by Mike Turi and Taejon Romanik, Wild Wild Wets has steadily gained traction in Southern California over the past decade. Through their past two albums, 2018’s Prisom and 2015’s 14th Floor, WWW has charted their growth from underground rockers to contenders in the burgeoning modern psych movement. Love Always sees the band’s most fully developed studio effort yet, employing a stable of production whizzes to amplify every crevice of the band’s expansive sound.
Recorded at Singing Serpent Studios in San Diego, Matt Van Allen (Anoushka Shankar) engineered the album with Emmy-winning video director JeanCarlo Mendez. Celebrated audio engineer Howie Weinberg, whose credits range from Nirvana‘s Nevermind to Daft Punk‘s Alive 2007, mastered the album.
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A centerpiece of Love Always is “The Seer”. In the lead-up to the album’s release, Wild Wild Wets released “The Seer” as a 4:20-minute single. On the album, however, the synthwave throwback stretches out into an eight-minute epic. Taken alongside the distant droning of the album-opening “Always Guilty” or the eerie indie-chill of the closing “Last Ditch”, it’s hard to believe that all of the songs came from the same record—or even the same band at times. Love Always shows not only the diversity of Wild Wild Wets, but just how many stylistic raindrops fall on the umbrella that is “psych.”
“This colorful mixtape of a record is a womb-to-the-tomb rollercoaster of a story,” the band said of the album. “The lows are low and the highs are way out there.”
Listen to the new Wild Wild Wets album Love Always via the player below or on your preferred streaming platform.
Wild Wild Wets – Love Always