- 12XU
- 2026
If you're tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation. But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024's Big Hotel, the "creatively and geographically scattered collective" was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump, who played in Spray Paint and ran the multimedia record label Monofonus Press before moving to Kingston, NY to help launch the esteemed venue Tubby's; Cleveland's Matthew J. Rolin, who releases solo guitar music and teams with wife Jen Powers in the Powers/Rolin Duo; and Detroit underground lifer Fred Thomas, whose many entanglements have lately included Tyvek and Idle Ray.
On their 2022 debut album No Island, that foursome channeled decades' worth of kosmische, post-punk, and psych into searching, meditative music with kick. It was an album built on trance-inducing repetition yet still grounded in decisively human force, the space-age surrealism of its droning synthesizers beautifully interacting with the scraping immediacy of its guitars and drums. Despite ostensibly working as zone-out music, it had a sense of embodiment that flew in the face of streaming-era passivity. That physicality intensified on LP2 when they added Shelley and Lonnie "Palmtree" Slack from Water Damage, an Austin combo who let their hard-crashing apocalyptic grooves spiral out into infinity.
Desert So Green, their third album, drops this Friday. It trades out some of the blustery, noisy tendencies of Big Hotel in favor of something a bit more pensive and reined-in. Winged Wheel began playing live shows in the summer of 2024, and rather than ramping up their aggression, performing together seems to have grounded and focused them. The arrangements unfold more quietly and patiently, as if they're zooming in on details within their vast creation rather than giving you the widescreen view. It's a fascinating and unique evolution, the sound of a band discovering its inner workings and moving with purpose.
In keeping with that transformation, Winged Wheel are more song-based here than ever before, even if those songs are haunted incantations that don't adhere to conventional pop structures. The increased attention to form and structure comes across in the singles, which run the gamut from the pounding, dissonant post-hardcore exercise "Speed Table" to the gracefully gliding guitar showcase "Beautiful Holy Jewel Home." Most effervescent among the advance tracks is "I See Poseurs Every Day," which plays sort of like ML Buch's attempt at a Pixies song: a lively rhythm section crashing through a surreal hall of mirrors that smells like winterfresh gum.
Despite the shift toward songwriting, Desert So Green is less like a collection of tracks than an immersive environment (one that, as per the album title, sometimes subverts expectations). Multiple vocalists come into the frame throughout, but the singing feels less like the center of attention than one element in a complex landscape, especially since so often they seem to be casting a spell rather than addressing the audience. This is a real collective effort, and each track reflects that, blurring the individual contributions into something grand, distinctive, and perfectly off-kilter. Unlike most supergroups, there's no evidence of competing egos — just the sound of brilliant artists putting their heads together, honing in on an alchemy all their own.
Desert So Green is out 1/9 via 12XU. Pre-order it here.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Zach Bryan's With Heaven On Top
• Dry Cleaning's Secret Love
• Jenny On Holiday's Quicksand Heart
• The Cribs' Selling A Vibe
• French Montana's Coke Wave 3.5: Narcos
• Robert Stillman's 10,000 Rivers
• The God Fahim's Ultimate Dump Gawd 2
• Pullman's III
• Sis And The Lower Wisdom's Saints And Aliens
• Glom's Below
• Zu's Ferrum Sidereum
• Home Star's A Binding Life
• Alter Bridge's Alter Bridge
• The Kid LAROI's Before I Forget
• Euphoria Again & Dogwood Tales' Destination Heaven
• Beyond The Black's Break The Silence
• Will Epstein's Yeah, mostly
• Lionheart's Valley Of Death II
• Lasse Lokøy's & The Roommates
• The Protomen's ACT III: THIS CITY MADE US
• Maya Delilah's The Long Way Round (Deluxe)
• Sondre Lerche's Turning Up The Heat Again EP
• Aliyah’s Interlude's KUNTOLOGY 101 EP
• Pacifist's five EP
