I have a memory of driving across a bridge last year, after impulsively moving to a new state, and bursting into tears when Forth Wanderers came on shuffle. I’d fallen in love with someone I just met, all of my friends were hours away, and my life was unrecognizable. I felt so many emotions that I felt nothing at all. The water was glimmering, and the guitars were reaching into my body and pulling something out of me, inflicting a simultaneous pain and release. The song was “Painting Of Blue.” I lost it at the end as Ava Trilling sang, “I’m just a painting of blue/ I’m just a painting to you/ You’re gonna paint me through.” I didn’t know why those words hit so hard; it could’ve been her resigned drawl that resonated, the way she sounds on the verge of giving up. The moment was a brief window into surrendering to the feelings that I’d been avoiding.
The emotional power of the Montclair indie rock group can somewhat be explained by the story of how they formed and how they disbanded. In high school, guitarist and songwriter Ben Guterl had a crush on Trilling. He sent her a demo as an excuse to talk to her, and she wrote lyrics to it. With guitarist Duke Greene, bassist Noah Schifrin, and drummer Zach Lorelli, the five-piece put out their first EP Mahogany in 2013 and followed it with the full-length Tough Love the next year while they were still in high school. The Slop EP arrived on Father/Daughter Records in 2016, and their eponymous Sub Pop debut came in 2018. In 2019, the band canceled their tour and Trilling shared an essay for Vice about her struggles with Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, and OCD. Since then, the band has been inactive and is ultimately considered over. These tales of the overwhelming anxiety of living and intimate romance laced with artistic chemistry, I think, play a large role in what makes their music so special.
Forth Wanderers’ songs have a sense of being inside someone’s head. On “Selfish,” the opener of Tough Love — which turns 10 this Saturday — Trilling sings, “I’m getting tired of having to explain myself.” In the songs, she doesn’t explain herself; her words strike the perfect balance of vague and specific, her turns of phrase simple yet full of depth: “The look on you makes me want to/ Fall into a deep sleep/ Where no one knows me,” she pleas on the twinkling “Sleeper.” Her lines of yearning and sadness are crafted like heavy confessions, yet they sound weightless and sweet when leaving her mouth and sinking into the lush pool of guitars. “The only way I can really write is by myself in my room with a notebook, listening to the song over and over again,” Trilling once said. “I’ve never sat down to write a story, I write the song as it unfolds.” In Forth Wanderers songs, it feels like you’re in her room with her, sitting on the floor watching her feelings pour out. And if you know anything about young women, you know being in her poster-clad room messy with favorite books and records is the closest you can get to being inside her head.
In her Vice essay, Trilling wrote of the envy she had for musicians who are able to tour without constant anxiety. I’ve always wondered why it’s the standard to expect all musicians to tour; when I think of artists in general, I think of people who feel like they’re on the outside of the world looking in, having trouble participating in it themselves. As a writer, I bailed on the first poetry reading I was invited to do because the thought of performing in front of an audience made me nauseous. I bare my soul in my writing because I cannot in real life; often, for artists, the only place that feels comfortable is in the miniature worlds they create. I imagine the situation is similar for Trilling. Tough Love is an oasis from the nonstop tumult of existence, a place where time slows down. “I don’t know where I went wrong/ Guess I felt good for too long,” Trilling despondently announces on “Blondes Have More Fun,” and the dreamy guitars feel like a crash pad for her fall. “I know you’re my blue eyed baby/ And it’s no surprise but it was never clear to me,” she sings later on, love and pain and worry all melding together.
Throughout Tough Love, Trilling mourns a different version of herself: “One day I’ll see the better part of me/ The one who leads you/ The one who wants to,” she yearns on the title track. Toward the end, she begs, “Don’t be hard on me/ I’m trying, yeah, I’m trying,” and it’s a crushing request, seeing someone at their lowest asking for mercy. Her feelings are frequently expressed in hypotheticals, desire failing before it can even bloom: “I wanna make you feel good/ Like I know I should/ Like I know I would,” she lulls on “Come Clean,” before conceding, “Help me I think I’m falling apart/ I can’t get rid of my aching heart.”
Tough Love is a phenomenal debut, and the band’s sweeping, emotional magnetism improved with Slop and Forth Wanderers. The reverb-laden, drifting guitars on “Slop” are entrancing; on “Know Better,” Trilling makes a hook out of the line “I can’t be this naïve anymore.” It’s ironic, considering she’d just graduated high school and had already written batches of incredibly mature songs. Forth Wanderers is packed with cozily poignant gems, but they expanded their sound by leaning into acoustic intimacy like on the beautiful “Be My Baby” as well as upping the ante with the crashing “Company.” Even if Forth Wanderers never come back, they left us with such wonderful material.
When Stereogum interviewed Forth Wanderers for the release of their self-titled LP, we declared in the headline that they made an indie rock record for the ages. In the comments, someone wrote, “I really like ’em, but I’m almost afraid to get too attached. Seems like a band that’s so loosely tethered that they might not be around all that long.” When asked about the main themes of the album, Greene answered, “A lot of confusion.” It’s interesting the way the songs seemed to mirror the state of the group. Still, the songs live on even if the band doesn’t; I got into them after they’d broken up, and I’m sure many others have and will continue to. We can’t be afraid to become attached to something just because we know it will end.
