Wildernesses bring Growth to London

Welcome to Folklore. Population 150.

There are many ways of getting close to music. There is the way of the listener, that slow accumulation of plays, the moment a lyric or a riff becomes part of your personal history. I’d done that part. I’d sat with Growth on trains and in the dark and written things in notebooks that were for no one. That kind of closeness is often private, a little embarrassing, and mostly one-directional apart from when it isn’t, such as here.

Then there is the other kind. Usually, there is a photo pit, a way of getting close that comes with its own set of rules. But the album launch for Wildernesses’ Growth was at Folklore in London, a place that looks like a bohemian cabinet of curiosities and feels like someone raided a David Lynch fever dream for props: mirrors on each side of the stage doubling everything, red curtains, a strip pole in the middle that to my knowledge no one used on the night. There is no photo pit because there isn’t room for one. There is barely room for the band and the people who bought tickets, which was everyone, because it sold out. Pressed together like strangers on a sweaty Northern line in winter, closeness stopped being a concept and became simply the situation.

Wildernesses walked on stage and nostalgia hit immediately. During the first song I was trying to remember when the last time I’ve seen such good post rock being played by a small band was. I couldn’t find an answer, but I let myself feel like I’m in the company of an old friend, who is also in the room, also feeling it, and also slightly overwhelmed. Singer Phil’s hands were shaking at times, not in a way that affected anything but visibly and honestly, the way that tells you that this matters to them in a manner that no amount of stage confidence can fully conceal. Drummer Ryan smiled for the entire set, and there is something about watching a band who seem to genuinely like each other that no production value in the world can replicate. Sam and Mark (guitar and bass) carried the show like the stage was larger than it was, and the four of them locked into each other with the new and inevitable ease of a band still discovering what they’re capable of together.

What happened next was something I wasn’t entirely prepared for, which is strange given how familiar I’ve become with the music. They played Growth in full; live, the album breathed differently, the pacing more deliberate and confident, each song landing where it needed to, the bass doing what it always does on the record except now it was one meter away and you felt it differently, in the body rather than just the ears. And the room felt it, too. There are crowds that watch and crowds that receive, and this was the latter. People were visibly happy and moved, a generosity flowing in both directions across a distance that had stopped being a distance, the band feeding off it and giving it back, the shaky hands at the beginning suddenly making complete sense because this is what they were nervous about being given, and they were getting it. At the end, the band announced there would be no encore, because this was the whole album. Someone in the crowd shouted “another album!”. There was a pause. I think they spoke for 150 of us.

Opening for Wildernesses were World Coda and their mesmerising blend of shoegaze, metal bleeding into long cinematic compositions that filled the mirrored room with something dreamy and vast, ethereal and melancholic until it wasn’t, the power arriving when you’d stopped expecting it. Ones to keep an eye on.

Lost Velvet were second, and if World Coda charged the room with something expansive, Lost Velvet made it darker and more specific. Layered and dreamy, with a 90s melancholy that somehow brough brought both Curve and Antimatter to mind, perfectly placed in a venue that was already halfway to Twin Peaks. Their second ever gig. An album is apparently coming. Good.