“Wild Yaks have made a name with an affirming and often riotous brand of rock music,” we wrote when introducing their forthcoming album Monumental Deeds back in May, “filling the gap between hopes and realities with a carefree embrace of the present.” The new record, coming later this month on Ernest Jenning Record Co., “feels like both a continuation of this spirit,” as we continued, “and the culminative product of twenty years spent pining and singing and howling at the moon.” A collection of songs written mostly during the worst of the COVID era where the sudden kick of mortality had lead Rob Bryn thinking he might never have a chance to find love again.
How better to represent such feelings than by leaning into the strange, glorious life of playing music? A life forever caught between success and failure, not to mention the will to settle down and compulsion to keep the wheels turning. Recent single ‘Desperado’ introduced the tight weave of desperation and defiance which marks the record. A decision to confront painful memories and regrets with carefree abandon. “When the ghosts of past selves and possible futures are strung out on the road before you,” as we put it, “sometimes the only option is to roll the windows down, put the pedal to the metal and feel that wind in your hair.”
Now Wild Yaks are back with new single, ‘Fortune Teller’. Another upbeat track of catharsis and self-deprecation which probes furthered into lost love, even if the relationship is still ongoing, looking for answers in esoteric places. “‘Fortune Teller’ is about realizing I wasn’t a science-based reasonable person but a broken simp reading several horoscopes a day and obsessed with CoStar because I was willing to use ‘magic’ or any means to try and predict my romantic fate,” Bryn explains. But when the pressures build and the alignment of the stars becomes overwhelming, there’s always the trusted Wild Yaks strategy. “I’ll do what I always do,” as Bryn yelps at one point. “I’ll just run away.”
