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

No Horizon

Merge

***No Horizon is the latest offering and sound of a project plumbing the depths of an “evolve or die” ethos. For multi-instrumentalists JENN WASNER and ANDY STACK, there is no fear of the unknown, no preciousness about rigidity, no hard definition of what WYE OAK is. The Baltimore-born, Durham-based pair spent 2012–2019 writing music while living in different parts of the country, but the five songs that make up No Horizon mark the first that Stack and Wasner composed while both lived in Durham. The EP was originally composed in a concentrated timeframe at the end of 2018 and early 2019, and then performed at New York’s Merkin Hall as part of Ecstatic Music Festival in collaboration with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. The resulting EP is distinctly and recognizably Wye Oak, while simultaneously unlike any other of the band’s studio work. Eerie and dreamy, a complicated, unpredictable amalgamation of thoughtful lyrics, steely glints of synths and effects, lithe guitar lines, and the depth of Wasner’s voice, it all unfurls with the ease of any Wye Oak song, built out by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus’ presence, their tangle of crystalline voices presenting like an orchestral arrangement. 12” is 45 RPM pink vinyl in a clear, screenprinted picture disc sleeve.

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.

Wye Oak

Tween

Merge

***The word 'tween' implies a certain, very specific kind of awkwardness, and those implications are rarely positive. But think about it like this: Something 'tween' is in the process of becoming something else, and there’s a very specific kind of beauty in that becoming. There’s something rewarding in recognizing and celebrating it—in meeting it halfway. Tween is a collection of eight songs born, raised, and almost abandoned for various reasons during the years between 2011’s breakthrough Civilian and 2014’s reinvention-of-sorts, Shriek. JENN WASNER and ANDY STACK described these songs as 'not emblematic of a step forward, but a step sideways in time.' In other words, they just didn’t make sense for album number five—which will happen at some point in the future. But just because they didn’t belong there doesn’t mean they don’t belong anywhere. To wedge them onto Shriek would’ve been dishonest; to orphan them would’ve been somewhere on the line between criminal and just plain silly."—Josh Modell