Wye Oak

Wye Oak

Shriek + Variations

Merge

***A limited edition expanded reissue of the fourth album from Wye Oak—Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack. Originally released in 2014, Shriek was the culmination of their intent to express the emotional and intuitive self by acting out animalistic exclamations through cathartic release. It was their most personal and confident declaration yet. Newly inspired by playing bass, Jenn took up songwriting in a setting where the guitar did not dictate harmonic boundaries or require a call-and-response relationship with her voice, a hallmark of previous Wye Oak records. With her phrasing freed, it was often Andy who interacted with Jenn’s vocals, playing syncopated and meditative keyboard parts, and the duo’s collaborative arrangements provided a backdrop in which both the arcs of melodies and the new rhythmic elements flourished. Features a second disc with five reworked Shriek tracks in collaboration with William Brittell. Limited to 1,100 copies.

Wye Oak

Every Day Like the Last: Collected Singles 2019-2023

Merge

***Every Day Like the Last: Collected Singles 2019–2023, is a physical home for three new tracks and previously released music from Wye Oak, charting the past four years of the band’s lives. Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack’s musical partnership bloomed in the uncertainty of that period, whenever they felt that Wye Oak had something to say. They shifted to quickly writing, recording, and releasing digital EPs and singles. To Stack, there is a thread running through what is seemingly chaos: “Finding cheer in the doom of the world.” Every Day Like the Last does just that, reminding the listener of the new heights Wye Oak have reached since 2018’s The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, while gazing into the unknown of what’s ahead. The title of this collection acknowledges that duality, posing it like a question: “every day like the day before it” or “every day like the last day on Earth?” “Both meanings apply,” Wasner says. There are no easy answers.

Wye Oak

Civilian + Cut All The Wires: 2009-2011

Merge

***Ten years after its release, Wye Oak’s Civilian remains a raw, sinewy punch of a record—bleak and intense and lonely and self-assured all at once. The album unravels with the sort of selfquestioning and uncertainty that come with youth, and its specific confidence in unflinchingly probing all of those emotions, feeling them to their deepest extent even when it’s tearing you apart at the seams. When Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner released Civilian, it marked both the ascension and death of Wye Oak, or at least a version of it. Now, a decade later, Civilian + Cut All the Wires: 2009–2011 delves back into that pivotal record and adds a lost album of unreleased tracks and demos to Civilian’s universe.

Wye Oak

The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs

Merge

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received an 8.0 rating from Pitchfork.  The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs—the triumphant fifth album by WYE OAK—begins with an explosion. For a few seconds, piano, drums, and a playful keyboard loop gather momentum; then, all at once, they burst, enormous bass flooding the elastic beat. The moment declares the second coming of Wye Oak, a band that spent more than a decade preparing to write this record—their most gripping and powerful set of songs to date, built with melodies, movement, and emotions that transcend even the best of their catalogue. Louder pursues a litany of modern malaises, each track diligently addressing a new conflict and pinning it against walls of sound, with the song’s subject and shape inextricably and ingeniously linked. LP housed in gatefold jackets/ Limited edition LP pressed on beige/blue split vinyl. LP housed in gatefold jackets/ Limited edition LP pressed on beige/blue split vinyl.