Wishy: the head-spinning Indianapolis indie-rockers growing together

It’s hot in Indianapolis. “It’s like 93 degrees out here,” Wishy’s Nina Pitchkites says, sitting behind the wheel of her parked car. The guitarist and vocalist has just finished up her shift as a drapery seamstress – after we’re done talking, the band have a meeting with their manager, and then, at seven, there’s rehearsal. “It’s a long day,” she adds, almost visibly wilting on the other end of the Zoom call.

It probably feels like everything in Wishy’s world is happening all at once. But that’s something they’ll have to get used to because they are one of the most exciting new rock bands operating anywhere right now. Having lit the fuse with a couple of vibrant EPs that introduced their blend of dream-pop textures, shoegaze guitar bliss-outs and Gin Blossoms jangle, they’re about to put out a debut record that will hit people like a 40-minute headrush.

‘Triple Seven’ ups the ante in every sense. It is a loud, boisterous, confident beast held together by a feast of beautifully wrought, candy-coated hooks that set the band apart as rare ’90s revivalists who understand that melodies trump aesthetics every day of the week. Sat behind a desk, removing his baseball cap at regular intervals to muss his hair, Pitchkites’ co-writer, guitarist and vocalist Kevin Krauter reflects on whether they started pressuring themselves to think up gooier confections as the prospect of album one rolled into view.

“I think we’re just born with it,” he says of their desire to pen earworm jams. Pitchkites agrees. “I want to write music that I want to listen to,” she chimes in. “And what I want to listen to most of the time is something with a melody. It’s rewarding to find that. A lot of music snobs have things to say about bands that just write hooks – I guess some people would say it’s predictable or something. But I don’t care. I want to hear a good hook. That’s it. It’s pretty simple.”

At its heart, Wishy’s story is about Pitchkites and Krauter discovering that there was someone out there who could finish their sentences in this manner. The pair first met in high school and became friends during the ensuing college years, spinning in and out of each other’s orbits before Pitchkites settled back in Indianapolis in 2021 following a brief stint in Philadelphia.

By that point, both of them had begun working out how they functioned as songwriters. In addition to playing in the indie-rock bands Hoops, Matrix and Sacred Copy, Krauter had put out a series of mannered indie solo records – including his wonderful 2020 LP ‘Full Hand’ – while Pitchkites investigated pillowy, lo-fi synth-pop under the name Push Pop.

Coming out of the pandemic, like so many people, Krauter had a hankering for some noise. “When I first started writing material for what turned into this band in 2020, I wasn’t really touring or doing anything; I was just having fun making stuff that was different from what I’d done before,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘I want to make some heavy stuff again.’ It had been a while since I’d played with distortion turned on for a whole song, you know?”

Having veered away from anything too gnarly during what he describes as a high school “hyper-fixation” on surfy indie-rock bands such as Real Estate and Beach Fossils, and with the future spreading out ahead of him like a long, anxiety-driven yawn, he doubled back towards some foundational sounds. “I feel like what we’ve been writing with this band is tapping into some alt-rock and almost pop-punk stuff that I listened to with my older brother when I was in middle school,” he says.

“Some of the best things are made when you’re not expecting it” – Nina Pitchkites

“And then it was a case of being like, ‘How can I revisit that in an interesting way that feels real and not hokey or too nostalgic?’ That’s the shit I first heard. Those music videos were the first ones I watched where I was like, ‘I really want to do that. I want to be in that kind of band.’ I wanted to rock out and play fun shows again.”

Pitchkites, too, had felt the inertia of that time weighing on her, tamping down her desire to be involved in music while playing live was off the table. When Krauter got in contact trying to make this germ of an idea happen, it resonated. In what was a major leap for writers who had established their own modes of working, they loosened their grip on the reins and started trading songs. “It was scary at first, trying to collaborate with someone,” Pitchkites admits. “I feel like maybe there was one other time in my life where I truly wrote a song with another person.”

It didn’t take long for that fear to turn into something more reassuring. Krauter and Pitchkites were quickly able to hold a mirror up to what the other person was trying to achieve. They found common ground in their love for The Sundays and the way the band’s idiosyncratic singer, Harriet Wheeler, would manipulate the space around a hook. They discovered a shared propensity for writing hits while stuck in traffic, windows up to the rest of the world. “You have to drive a lot in Indianapolis,” Krauter observes.

“It was really easy to come together,” he continues. “Nina and I are both students of a good hook. When I first heard her solo music. I was like, ‘Oh, shit, OK…’ I could tell she was someone who cared about a good melody – not just something to fill the space. That’s what got me so excited about starting a band together. I really like the melodies that Nina writes, and I felt like we could really snap on some shit together because that’s what I care about.”

As so many young bands do, they cycled through configurations. The first of Wishy’s two 2023 EPs was initially intended for a separate, more abrasive project under the name Mana, for example. But it’s telling that some of their key blueprints were drawn up right back at the start. In 2022, Pitchkites pulled together the title track from ‘Triple Seven’ in tandem with songwriter Steve Marino, an on-off member of Angel Du$t and Bugg, whose 2023 album ‘Too Late To Start Again’ scratches a similar power-pop itch to some of Wishy’s sunnier tracks.

Named after a slot machine jackpot and ‘angel number’, which Pitchkites says represents “spiritual awakening and knowing one’s self”, its snaking, baggy groove and lilting vocal capture in amber the spirit that first drew Wishy’s creative cogs into alignment. Later that year, Pitchkites, Krauter and Marino took it to the West Coast to work with Ben Lumsdaine, who is, like Marino, an Indiana kid now based in Los Angeles.

“Early on, there was a timidity towards really going for it” – Kevin Krauter

“I’d never recorded anything professionally,” Pitchkites says. “It’s always been me with my laptop in my room. It was less intimidating going into Ben’s home studio and I loved that I knew him from Indiana. I was just going to come out for fun and we were going to record this thing and see how it went. That just took so much pressure off the whole situation.”

Those sessions became a bellwether for both the band’s sound and their process. The growing ease with one another that Pitchkites and Krauter discovered in LA soon translated into a writing spree: they continued to challenge their existing routines without ever bending them into shapes they didn’t recognise.

The swooning atmospherics of ‘Triple Seven’ seeped into their collective palette, and more than 20 tracks were recorded over the following year. Five of them ended up on the ‘Paradise’ EP and others, knitted together thematically or in terms of feel, were set aside for ‘Triple Seven’. “I feel like [early on] there was a certain timidity towards really going for it. It took time to get the vibe through everything we’ve recorded so far,” Krauter adds. “But it’s definitely led up to where it really feels like we can rip it. It feels right.”

Alongside crushing three-guitar bluster served up by a band now also featuring guitarist Dimitri Morris, bassist Mitch Collins and drummer Conner Host, ‘Triple Seven’ captures a surge of feelings, from starry-eyed longing to the keen hope that things are about to fall into place. Often, Krauter and Pitchkites’ lyrics describe laying it all out there in pursuit of something cool or beautiful (see ‘Love on the Outside’’s brass tacks: “You say the word, and I’ll fall at your feet”), and their own journey reflects that. They have taken the idea of throwing your lot in with someone because you have nothing to lose and pressed it to wax. “I feel like some of the best things are made when you’re not expecting it,” Pitchkites says.

Now, the challenge is to keep moving. But with work currently underway on songs for their next record, you get the sense that Krauter and Pitchkites are already ahead of the curve, developing a more detailed shorthand with each other as we follow in their wake. “It takes the pressure off,” Krauter says of their evolution as a team. “You don’t have to be like, ‘I gotta do this whole thing, I gotta make sure this bridge works, I gotta make sure all these melodies work’.” Or, as Pitchkites succinctly puts it, “It’s growth.”

Wishy’s ‘Triple Seven’ is released on August 16 via Winspear

Listen to Wishy’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music

Words: Huw Baines
Photography: Rian Archer
Styling & Wardrobe: Conor Shepherd
Label: Winspear

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