It’s been almost five years since the last release by Wandering Lake. The last album, Wend to Why, came in May 2015, a record which added some contemporary rhythms to the project’s ragged, psychedelic folk—what we once described as “hymns to soundtrack the incense-scented mind journeys of a forest-dwelling hermit.”
Still very much the project of singer songwriter Brian Kupillas, Wandering Lake has grown in the last few years, most notably to include Conrad Burnham as producer and major collaborator. Kupillas met Burnham in LA, and the pair began to feed off each other’s creative energies. The ultimate result of this partnership is a new Wandering Lake album, Wild Dogs. A collection of eleven songs, the record was written and recorded across a span of four years in garages, bedrooms and a ranch in the Mojave desert.
The album’s title is inspired by the Roberto Bolaño poem ‘Dirty, Poorly Dressed’, in which the poet’s soul comes across his heart on the road “shattered, but alive.” It remains to be seen how much of that will be reflected in the music, but expect themes of movement, self-exploration and that seemingly never-ending search for something that might reside within ourselves all along.
The album will be released intermittently over the next few months, and today we have the pleasure of sharing the first single. ‘Destine’ is what Kupillas describes as a “moody jazz ballad,” taking the basic Wandering Lake formula and distilling it into something tense and dreamlike. Violin weaves around the simple strum of guitar as the whole song shimmers around Kupillas’s distinctive vocals. He says the track confronts a flawed conceit in people’s ideas of destiny. “If one can be destined for greatness,” he posits, “then the inverse must also be true: some are meant only for tragedy.”
“I can believe in chance
but how could there be a plan?
how could you understand misfortune?”
The track comes complete with a video which is beautiful in itself, a rose-tinted kaleidoscope of memories presented as splintered home movies, smudged and blurred by light leaks and lens flare. Check it out below:
If that wasn’t enough, the single also comes with a second track. ‘TLDR’ is “an abbreviated biography of its singer, an arrhythmic blues song that tells the veiled story of his journey westward to Los Angeles.” The song is self-perpetuating, whipping itself up into a swirl of staticky noise as Kupillas strums his guitar with abandon. It’s every bit as evocative and atmospheric as the title track, and confirms Wild Dogs as one of the most intriguing albums on the horizon.
Destine is out on the 28th February and available now from the Wandering Lake Bandcamp page. Stay tuned for news on the full album too.