CoSign: The Irresistible Alchemy of Wishy

The post CoSign: The Irresistible Alchemy of Wishy appeared first on Consequence .

Every month, Consequence puts the spotlight on rising artists with CoSign . For August 2024, we’re excited about the Indiana quintet Wishy and their irresistible debut, Triple Seven.

It’s 2004 and the era of big-budget alternative rock has reached its peak. Rob Cavallo and Butch Walker are producing punchy pop rock records and both Good Charlotte and Sum-41 have filmed videos for their hit songs in empty pools. Michelle Branch is belting skyscraping choruses and the Third Eye Blind snare sound is king. Meanwhile, Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites are kids in the midwest, listening to their siblings’ LimeWire downloads, surrounded by the bombastic sheen of early aughts radio pop, learning how to play guitar.

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“Once my older brother got LimeWire, it was Good Charlotte, New Found Glory, Silverstein, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, all of that… the first time I watched those music videos of those bands just rocking out, wearing skate shoes, playing in empty pools, getting into hijinks on tour, I was like, ‘That needs to be me. Whatever happens in my life, I need to achieve that,'” Kratuer recalls over Zoom . “I was totally captivated.”

Fast forward 20 years later: Krauter and Pitchkites now lead a band of their own in their hometown of Indianapolis, a quintet called Wishy . Their excellent debut album, Triple Seven , arrived this month, and it bears a strong resemblance to the ecstatic power pop and dreamy alternative rock that swam around the radio waves during their childhood. Even the album cover features these nostalgic notes — a bright red tomato with a backlit slot machine inside, set against a velvety navy blue fabric, all hearkening back to a time dominated by heavily saturated colors and bold contrasts.

In the beginning, Wishy’s sound was much closer to shoegaze, and upon signing with the indie label Winspear in 2023, they were positioned to be yet another revival act . Their grand entrance last fall was “Donut,” an explosive-but-dreamy track with all the hallmarks of the genre: wavy, washy guitar straight from the Kevin Shields playbook, hushed harmonies between Pitchkites and Krauter, and an undeniable sense of malaise.

But subsequent singles demonstrated an urge to go beyond the introverted crutches of the now-in-demand genre. They wanted their debut album to be louder, bigger, brattier. After all, as much as Krauter and Pitchkites have been influenced by bands like My Bloody Valentine, that’s not exactly the music that left lasting impressions on them in their formative years.

“I didn’t even know what shoegaze was until I was, like, 17,” Pitchkites says before naming some of her essential favorites of adolescence: Good Charlotte, The All-American Rejects, Simple Plan.

“We could just be another ’90s worship band, which in many ways we are,” says Krauter. “But like, the 2000s shit has this weird, post-9/11 ‘don’t give a fuck’ brattiness. There’s an element of tenacity in that music that the ’90s rock didn’t have.”

Whatever the influence, these songs are indeed tenacious, crammed full of life and teeming with desire. “Sick Sweet,” the album’s ecstatic, Oasis-indebted opener, is exactly as psyched up as its title suggests. Lead single “Love on the Outside” sounds like a long-lost power pop gem from 25 years ago, with Krauter soaring through the chorus in earnest clarity. Even on their more downtempo tracks, there’s bustling activity and unceasing momentum; the passionate warmth of “Just Like Sunday” is offset with a charged guitar solo, adding a dose of chaos to Pitchkites’ Lilith Fair-core confessionals.

Despite the throwback sound, Triple Seven is not nostalgia service. The record demonstrates how intuitive Krauter and Pitchkites’ songwriting is, both independently and together. Rounded out with drummer Connor Host, bassist Mitch Collins, and fellow guitarist Dimitri Morris, Wishy is a harmonious joining of Krauter and Pitchkites’ minds. They yin each other’s yang; when Krauter goes heavier, Pitchkites arrives to take some of the edge off.

Krauter had first wanted to start a project with Pitchkites around 2019, but she moved to Philadelphia before it could materialize. When the pandemic and the end of a relationship re-routed Pitchkites back to Indianapolis, Kratuer immediately told her, “All right, you’re home. Pick up your guitar. We’re starting this band.”

Still, when forming Wishy, they expected nothing — after all, as they say, Indianapolis has a “low ceiling as far as upward mobility.” They didn’t have a guaranteed record deal or a clear path to quitting their day jobs. They didn’t have the inevitability of transcending their midwest locales and touring the world — hell, when they started the project, they had a hard enough time finding musicians who weren’t in a bunch of other local acts already. “The scene is incestuous, everyone is just in each other’s bands!” notes Pitchkites.

Over the following three years, Wishy crafted Triple Seven by having Krauter and Pitchkites bring their individual songs to the table and expanding on them as a team. While December’s Paradise EP served as a worthy sampler, especially Pitchkites’ Madchester banger “Spinning,” the group chose to reserve the more energetic songs for Triple Seven .

The lead singers of Wishy are both guitarists with a similar bank of influences, but their songwriting styles echo the contrasts found in Triple Seven ’s album cover. “Our solo music was pretty different from each other,” says Pitchkites, who performed for years under the moniker Push Pop. “I took a more electro-pop approach, while he was more in the indie rock world… but the common denominator is that we both love writing pop melodies. I’m a sucker for a hook, can’t get enough of them.”

Krauter notes his tendencies to take a more polished product or song structure and “fuck it up.” Many of Wishy’s songs feel like they’re headed towards major key catharsis before abruptly turning on their heads. “Love on the Outside” detours from anthemic and pure to a heavy 32-bar outro a short walk away from a Turnstile riff. The five-minute “Busted” shifts its moods like a chameleon, constantly sandwiching sweeter chords between sour ones. Where they could resolve, Wishy move sideways instead; what could sound like pure ecstasy is mired with doubt and uncertainty.

“When I’m writing a song, I feel like I have this natural instinct to fuck it up somehow, to turn it upside down a little bit. Otherwise I get bored,” Krauter says. “I feel like I always have the instinct of being extra. I think a big part of that was listening to Oh, Inverted World by The Shins when I was younger and first learning guitar, trying to listen and play along to the chords, and being like, ‘Whoa, these chord structures are going in an unexpected direction.’ Just shifting keys really naturally in this sort of Baroque way — all of that has always really tickled me when I hear it in a song.”

Taking more cues from the pop-punk of yore, Krauter also belts and sneers on Triple Seven in a way he rarely did on his dreamy solo albums Toss Up and Full Hand . “I think I was getting sick of the ‘soft indie dude’ vocals,” says Krauter, “I like making pretty sounding stuff, but I was at a point where I just wanted to fucking rock out and write some vocal stuff that I can sing loudly and have more fun with.”

Pitchkites, on the other hand, notes that her style tends to be more straightforward than Krauters, and she’s been challenging herself to get a little “crazier” with the songwriting process. “I think I’ve always been a little afraid to go too far outside the box. I’ll tell myself that it’s not valid enough to have these four chord songs, and then I remember that a lot of the best songs ever written are four chord songs,” she says. “I would love to bend more towards Kevin’s way of writing, of just being more adventurous, because I keep feeling like I need to like stay in a certain lane, but really, there’s no lane to stay in at the end of the day.”

Krauter and Wishy’s overall unpredictability isn’t just an intriguing feature of their product — it separates Wishy from both their power pop contemporaries and the style of conventional rock they’re drawing upon. Pitchkites may find herself echoing the structures of four-chord songs, but she and the band consistently dig deeper and find nuance within these arrangements.

The stunning shoegaze cut “Little While” is a great example. Pitchkites leads the track, which is rooted in a relatively simple chord structure and describes being too overwhelmingly depressed to make plans with friends. But when the band reaches the chorus, they ramp up their energy and volume levels, making what was a solemn mid-tempo track feel like a swirling fire tornado. Even as Pitchkites retreats to softly say, “I’ll call you back in a little while,” that interior feeling of numbness is fashioned as an adrenaline-fueled release.

“‘Little While’ was the first song I wrote for the band,” Pitchkites says. “I had just moved back home after ending a two-year relationship, I was feeling lost and uncertain of my purpose, but Kevin had asked me to be in this band… it’s a very melancholy song and is indicative of how I was feeling at the time.”

It’s fitting that the bones of “Little While” were written at one of Pitchkites’ lowest points, but the arrangement and final product that made it onto Triple Seven burns with majestic brightness. These songs about desire and ambition were crafted when Krauter and Pitchkites had nothing to lose, and the assuredness that dominates the record is indicative of both those early aughts influences and the intuitive camaraderie of leading this band together — plus, the album’s crisp production bears a decidedly hi-fi, expensive-sounding sheen, presenting Triple Seven as an alternate reality rock radio classic.

Krauter and Pitchkites say that a lot of the album’s exuberance comes from the luck of finding each other later in their music careers, from “gambling it all” as Krauter says in “Sick Sweet.” But the word that comes up the most in our conversation is “intuitive.” The band taps into the energy of memory and childhood, fused with the adrenaline-laced joys of discovery, with so much ease that it feels second nature. Some individual elements might seem familiar, but it adds up to a sound like no other.

CoSign: The Irresistible Alchemy of Wishy
Paolo Ragusa