Winged Wheel were already a supergroup when members of no wavers Spray Paint, garage rock revivalists Tyvek, ambient experimentalist Matchess, and primitive guitarist Matthew J. Rolin teamed up remotely to make the murky post-punk of 2022’s No Island. For its 2024 follow-up, Big Hotel, they brought Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelly and Water Damages’ Lonnie Slack into the fold. These inclusions signaled a reorientation of the band, pushing beyond the haze of their debut to craft something bigger, brighter, and louder. Their noise-rock psychedelia felt like eavesdropping on a casual jam session among friends who had been playing together for 20 years.
Keeping the lineup steady for their third album, Winged Wheel have locked into their newfound cohesion while venturing into new territory. If Big Hotel felt like the band homing in on their prowess and energy, Desert So Green explores the limits of their sound, seeing what new styles they can dive into, deconstruct, and rebuild. The result is both the band’s most experimental and cohesive record to date, a mass of cosmic krautrock, dreary ambient synths, and eerie avant-garde touches that guarantee any conventional song structure or form could never take root.
Consider the wasteland take on Neu! that is “Canvas 11,” the opening cut of the album. Humming synth lines, heavy basslines, and swooping, sun-kissed guitar riffs come in over Shelly’s steady snare hits as the song gradually builds. But instead of letting it bloom into any sort of climax, the band allows the energy to rise and fall naturally, unafraid to let their music shift into natural whirs of decay and echo. The band enjoys being amorphous, delighting in the journey a song can take rather than its destination. “More Frog Poems” and “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” are the most beautiful tracks, lumbering masses of guitar fuzz, slow-motion drums, and ghostly buried vocals that sound like cult chants sampled from an otherworldly radio broadcast.
Even when the band explores new terrain like the halting, metallic post-punk of “Speed Table” or the dub coated psych-pop of “I See Poseurs Every Day,” they are still imbued with a sense of disorientation. On Desert So Green, Winged Wheel are a band of veteran musicians not interested in showing off but exploring what new sounds they can discover collectively. Listening can feel like stumbling through a landscape that is both brutal and stunning, comprising raga drone and haunted violin screeches as well as beautifully woozy stoner rock and idyllic birdsong, all colliding into unexpected forms. Instead of drawing attention to their experimentation, Winged Wheel make those sonic paths feel completely natural, trusting us to follow along even if they’re not sure where they’re headed.
