Wishy – ‘Triple Seven’ review: crushing noise meets star-crossed melodic brilliance

19 August, 2024

Wishy (Credits: Alexa Viscius)

It can be hard to maintain a genuine sense of earnestness in indie-rock. There’s good reason for snark being many bands’ default mode – it’s easier to pull off, but it’s also less emotionally revealing. There is a particular alchemy at work on Wishy’s ‘Triple Seven’, with the Indianapolis band delivering songs that communicate crashing, outsized feelings while retaining a potent air of disaffected, Gen X-coded cool.

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

On their debut album, Wishy (Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites on guitar and vocals, plus guitarist Dimitri Morris, bassist Mitch Collins and drummer Conner Host) tap into a shared obsession with melody, threading undeniable hooks between atmospheric, often crushingly loud, swatches pulled from dream-pop, shoegaze and gauzy alt-rock.

Coupled with their uninhibited star-crossed takes on love and relationships, these chiming refrains are addictive and refreshing, lending impetus to what can appear to be a dog-eared set of blueprints. It’s hard not to get swept along by the opening line of ‘Just Like Sunday’; “I waited too long to take you to the movies”, Pitchkites intones over ticking percussion and washes of acoustic guitar. You have to commit to the style, or it quickly falls flat – and throughout, Wishy are all in, foregrounding the seam of melodrama that knits Krauter and Pitchkites’ writing together.

Krauter spins away from the bedroom-pop-meets-Wild Pink sound of his solo work into something thrillingly noisy on ‘Sick Sweet’, as he sings: “You’re like an afterlife and I really wanna die tonight.” The song eventually lands somewhere between Archers of Loaf’s rattling college-rock and the rough-hewn emo of Tigers Jaw. On the title track, meanwhile, Pitchkites comes at a similar sentiment from a totally different angle. Her understated delivery combines with jagged guitar jangle as she half-murmurs: “let go of my hand, it’ll only start a fire”. It’s perfectly judged, allowing the lyric’s sting to creep up on you as the melody rattles around your skull.

Album closer ‘Spit’ is a riffy monster with a sparring tandem vocal unlike anything else here. It suggests that Wishy’s sound is set to get significantly more muscular as time goes on but, crucially, it’s still shot through with some of the LP’s most potent hooks. That is their lodestar, and it looks set to lead them somewhere very exciting indeed.