Nearly a decade into their life as a band, The Wldlfe have learned that sometimes figuring out where you’re going means spending a little less time looking too far ahead.
That perspective seems especially fitting as the Nashville trio prepares to release Revolver, a record that finds Jansen Hogan, Jack Crane and Carson Hogan building on the identity they’ve spent years refining while embracing something slightly different: storytelling.
The album has been a year in the making, the longest the band has spent working on a single project.
“The first time that we sat down and started recording the album was literally a year ago this week,” says lead singer Jansen Hogan as the trio sits down to chat with Variance ahead of the album's release on Oct. 2.
For a band whose music has often pulled from personal experiences, Revolver offered an opportunity to step outside of themselves. That shift is perhaps clearest on “Ruby,” one of the album’s standouts and a song Jansen says began simply because he wanted to write about someone who didn’t actually exist.
“We’ve been a band for almost a decade now, and there’s been a lot of music, and a lot of kind of that music has been inspired by our own experiences and our own lives,” he explains. But when he began working on “Ruby,” he found himself “bored of writing about my own stuff.”
Instead, Jansen decided to invent a story. The spark came unexpectedly when he spotted a red pickup truck while driving and a lyric began forming in his head. From there, “Ruby” became something fictional, rather than an account of his own life.
“When I finished writing that one, it felt like, okay, this feels cool and fresh for us,” he says.
That song also helps establish the larger narrative running through Revolver. Jansen describes “Ruby” as something of an introduction to the record, while its title track functions as the ending. The songs between them fill in the relationship between the album’s narrator and Ruby.
“The goal with the record in general is sort of to tell a whole narrative story to some degree,” Jansen says.
By the time the album reaches “Revolver,” that relationship has run its course. The title itself comes from the song’s central idea of finally stopping your world from revolving around another person.
“Revolver is sort of the period at the end of it all,” Jansen explains, calling it an “I’m closing a chapter” type of song.
Interestingly, the title existed in the band’s orbit before the song did. Jansen recalls the three of them talking one day about how Revolver would simply be a great band name. He later went home and wrote a song with that title.
That combination of instinct and intention seems to characterize much of The Wldlfe’s evolution. The band members acknowledge there is a clear dividing line between who they were before 2020 and who they became afterward.
Crane points to that period as a time when they were still working out exactly what The Wldlfe should be. In the years since, he says, the process has become less about searching for an identity and more about refining one they already understand.
“There’s like the pre-COVID era band,” Crane says, describing that period as one of “thinking out what this band is, like what we want to sound like, what we want to be.”
Since then, he says, each album has been about growing that foundation rather than starting over. Jansen agrees, noting that the unexpected downtime gave them more space to determine where they wanted to go as a band.
That evolution has occasionally put The Wldlfe in the same conversation as artists such as Nightly, COIN and The Band CAMINO, comparisons the trio seems comfortable with. Carson says he doesn't necessarily interpret those comparisons as either praise or criticism, but rather evidence that the artists share some musical DNA.
“I think it just shows that all of us grew up and are inspired by the same type of music,” he says, adding that he considers those bands great. Crane puts it even more simply: “We’re all fans of each other.”
Now, after spending months making Revolver, The Wldlfe are quickly shifting into another phase. The band is heading on tour just two weeks after the album arrives, an unusually tight turnaround even for a group accustomed to getting back on the road shortly after releasing new music.
For Carson, having the record and tour arrive almost simultaneously only adds to the excitement. Crane describes it as a long period of preparation suddenly coming together all at once.
Jansen, meanwhile, likes the idea that listeners will have a couple of weeks to live with the record before hearing the songs in a live setting.
“It gives everybody two weeks to learn the music, and then we get to go out and share it with everybody,” he says.
As for what happens beyond Revolver and the tour, the band isn't especially interested in mapping everything out just yet.
“I think we’ve stopped thinking about the future to some degree,” Jansen says. While there was once more focus on dreaming about future milestones, he says their attention now is on “what’s right in front of us” and doing the best they can with it.
That doesn't mean The Wldlfe are slowing down. Carson promises there will be “more music and more shows” after this chapter, even if they aren't ready to say exactly what those will look like.
For now, they're firmly in tour mode. Jansen describes the band's creative process as cyclical: writing gives way to recording, mixing and mastering, then planning a tour and finally taking the songs on the road. Ideas may always be floating around, but different seasons require different kinds of attention.
And right now?
“We’re much in tour mode,” he says, with one immediate priority in mind: “making sure lights are awesome as possible.”
After nearly 10 years together, perhaps that's the clearest indication of where The Wldlfe find themselves with Revolver. They're no longer consumed with figuring out exactly what the band might someday become.
They know who they are. Now they get to enjoy what's right in front of them.■
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The Wldlfe's tour dates:
10.17 Orlando, FL - The Social
10.19 Houston, TX - Bronze Peacock
10.20 Austin, TX – Brushy Street Commons
10.21 Dallas, TX – The Studio at The Bomb Factory
10.23 Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom
10.24 San Diego, CA – Voodoo Room
10.26 Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy
10.27 San Francisco, CA – The Independent
10.29 Seattle, WA – Neumos
10.30 Portland, OR – Polaris Hall
11.02 Salt Lake City, UT – Soundwell
11.03 Denver, CO – Marquis
11.06 Milwaukee, WI – Argo
11.07 Chicago, IL – Outset
11.08 Columbus, OH – Skully’s
11.09 Toronto, ON – Mod Club
11.11 Boston, MA – Brighton Music Hall
11.12 Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts
11.13 New York, NY – Racket
11.14 Washington, DC – Songbyrd
11.17 Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle
11.18 Atlanta, GA – Terminal West
12.04 Nashville, TN – Basement East
