Wunderhorse: ‘We’ve kicked and scratched our way to this point’

‘The minute you think you’ve found it and are going to stay there, you’re in serious trouble,’ Wunderhorse frontman Jacob Slater sagely tells M.

Having turned heads with their raw fusion of indie, punk and Americana on their 2022 debut LP Cub (which was written solely by Jacob), the band, who now operate as a four-piece, were determined to push into uncharted territory with their follow-up Midas, out tomorrow (30 August).

‘There's a Bob Dylan quote, “We have never arrived. We are in a constant state of becoming”,’ Jacob, reflecting on Wunderhorse’s evolving ethos, continues. ‘That’s fucking bang-on [from] the big man, the OG!’

Completed by guitarist Harry Fowler, drummer Jamie Staples and bassist Peter Woodin, the quartet broke new ground with Midas by writing collaboratively. A songwriting approach that was informed by their extensive time on tour together, Wunderhorse were intent on capturing their ‘visceral’ live energy on record that was somewhat absent from, as Jamie describes, the ‘safe’ recordings heard on Cub.

‘I want you to feel like you’re in a room full of teenagers thrashing out some songs,’ Jacob says about Midas. ‘We could have gone more commercial with the second album… [but] if you’re playing to the gallery, you're probably going to lose your soul a bit. So we made a conscious decision to go in the opposite direction.’

‘I want you to feel like you’re in a room full of teenagers thrashing out some songs when listening to Midas.' - Jacob Slater

Jacob hopes that people will practice ‘active listening’ by giving their undivided attention to Midas during their first playthrough: ‘It’s quite a dark record. [I imagine people listening to it] in a very dark, windowless room with a spring mattress, without the mattress — just the springs.’

Though the initial songwriting ideas for Midas still came from Jacob, he invited his bandmates to write their individual parts around him.

‘I think [Harry, Jamie and Peter] make enough room for what’s important in the basics of the song,’ he explains. ‘Everyone's really good at adding things that I couldn’t think of which don't get in the way of the essence or the sentiment that the song is trying to communicate.’

‘Jacob’s songwriting… all the songs have this space to them. You don't have to force anything,’ Harry adds in agreement. ‘How everyone plays the songs totally informs what I decide to play. These guys give me a creative outlet that just wouldn't exist if I was sitting in my room alone playing guitar.’

Jamie insists that he’s ‘never been part of something with such a strong common goal and a dogged attitude towards what we're trying to achieve,’ adding: ‘I've been in many bands that wanted those things, but have not worked this hard to do it.’

While it was primarily a solo project of Jacob’s, Cub put Wunderhorse firmly among UK guitar music’s brightest prospects. The album placed highly on several best-of lists in 2022 and helped the band earn support slots with the likes of Fontaines D.C., Foals and Sam Fender, as well as a coveted place on the Glastonbury line-up in 2023.

With the band now officially a four-piece and Midas imminent, Wunderhorse’s continued success is the result of the hard yards each bandmember has made over the course of a decade, weaving in and out of other ill-fated bands. This tenacious work ethic should be a priority for young music creators, suggests Jacob.

‘Everything else has to take a back seat if you want to make it work, and I mean everything,’ he tells M. ‘You have to go after it tooth and nail and be prepared to decide that you really want it, especially in the early stages when you're getting yourself established. I’m about to turn 27, it's taken 10 years to get here. These boys are all in the same boat — we've kicked and scratched our way to this point.’

‘Everything else has to take a back seat if you want to make it work.' - Jacob Slater

Harry agrees. ‘There's a long period where you're not actually yourself yet, and it takes a long time to get there,’ he says about his own path as a songwriter. ‘But that process can take so long — you have to want it enough. Then it recycles [into] something else later, because you have to catch up with yourself creatively. You find who you are for a brief time, and then you're going to be lost again.’

Peter then jumps in: ‘In the same way that you’ll never finish developing as a person.’

With the band set to embark on their biggest UK and Ireland tour to date in October, including a date at London’s O2 Academy Brixton, the present and future of Wunderhorse look positively upbeat. Though there’s a distinctly humble inter-band aura, Jamie admits one thing about their common goal: ‘I mean, in the back of our minds… it's fucking conquering the world, you know?’

‘Why aim any lower?’ asks Jacob. ‘You can't stop it once you're in this vehicle, and you realise that you can't get off. You might as well see how far it can go. It'll stop when the wheels come off, or it explodes. But up until that point, we're all sitting in it, so let’s take it as far as it can possibly run.’