Wallows

Holding firmly to their musical upbringings, Wallows shed rock-band labels and look ahead.

When Dylan Minnette and Braeden Lemasters first arrived to participate in the GigMasterz program at the Keyboard Galleria Music Center—already good friends—fellow musician and then 11-year-old Cole Preston was unsure how to find his place within the happy twosome. It was an intimidating conundrum that most of us have experienced in adolescence: making new friends. Minnette and Lemasters had already built their friendship—introduced via their mothers—off a passionate love of all things music and chicken tenders paired with honey mustard. A tight bond to find space for another friend, indeed.

“I was the wild card,” Preston offers lightheartedly. But it didn’t take long for Minnette and Lemasters to welcome Preston into their group—and over a decade later, the three friends have spent close to every waking moment sunk deep in a world colored by their insatiable love for music.

Preston fondly recalls his discovery of Halcyon Digest—the Deerhunter album he admits to consuming for a long period of his life. While Lemasters, whose obsession over a certain Liverpool quartet is well-known by the other two, reveals he once tweeted a list of his top ten albums when he was thirteen: “They were all Beatles records,” he says laughing.

He even jokes that because his mother, pregnant with him at the time, would attend his father’s concerts his love of music started in the womb. After linking up with Minnette, Lemasters admits he’d trick his friend into thinking he wrote some of those songs by the classic artists shown to him by his dad.

“I’d be like: ‘Hey dude check out this song I wrote.’And Dylan would go: ‘Damn!” he says laughing.

The trio were in tune—almost oddly so for their age—with a lot of the music that has come to define the early 00s. It’s all laid out on their debut album Nothing Happens, their first record released under their WALLOWS moniker. Filled with the kind of giddy, unpredictable temperaments that makes such labels like alternative or rock feel woefully restrictive— Nothing Happens is as much an ode to the trio’s departure from their youth as it is to the songs and artists that soundtracked it for them.

And the scenes that run through the heads of the trio when the tracks of Nothing Happens unravel themselves seem a bit dated, potentially, lost to a decade of technological advancements that have made some of their parts obsolete. Scenes filled with CDs from The Strokes and Arcade Fire—The Suburbs, an album Lemasters says the “world revolved around for a moment”—or when Preston spent a drive to Santa Clarita in a Subaru showing Minnette his latest infatuation: Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys.

Growing-up in Los Angeles the three inevitably collided with the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, a right-of-passage for any serious music fan. A lineup from 2011 was particularly affecting—one that brought together a wealth of artists and bands they looked up to.

“It was Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire, and The Strokes, and Kanye,” Preston explains. “All headlining that year which was like for us at that time being thirteen—that was the most stacked lineup that could ever happen for us.”

Only a couple of months ago the trio returned to Coachella—this time as Wallows—playing songs from their debut to fans that braved the heat of an afternoon slot to go see them. There’s a surreality, one that Minnette still seems wrapped-up in, to playing a festival you grew-up attending. “We’ve been in that crowd so many times,” he says, wonder still in his voice.

But the stages of the Empire Polo Fields are not the only iconic venues the trio have stepped onto. Before they were Wallows, the three cut their teeth and honed their sound on the Sunset Strip. It was an era in which the band assumed fully the leather jacket, suave- rock style of the bands they’d become so deliriously enamored by. But Preston is quick to assert the moment as just a phase, one the band moved quickly on from when they realized they didn’t want to just make “rock music.”

“I think we did a million shows on the Sunset Strip—and I think because we were young we were super into the leather jacket, cool, confident—we were into that because we were very young,” says Preston. “But as we got older we’ve grown and strayed away from that men-

86tality— I don’t really consider us a rock band. Like I don’t want people to think we are out here trying to create or save or have anything to-do with what is known as ‘rock music.’ For us it’s about being as creative as possible, yes we have guitars but I think that’s simply because that’s what we grew up playing.”

And Nothing Happens holds up to Preston’s claims. Sure, the band fiddles around with guitars and deliver some hot riffs in the process— but they also favor a bit of synthesizer and vocal support from electro pop songstress Clairo— aren’t afraid to add some funky horns—or even drop the beat into slow-crawl that meanders around Minnette’s depthless croon. Every song on Nothing Happens stands in stark contrast to the last but they’re all united by the band’s willingness to texture their music with whatever “weird choices,” as Lemasters puts it, that makes them feel most inspired. For an album titled Nothing Happens, a lot sure is going down.

“Our favorite record for a while was Blonde—it’s one of our favorite albums. And I can see us doing something like that or working with like the Brockhampton people,” Preston says, outlining the myriad of possibilities for Wallows future. “There’s so much great music happening and it’s all happening at the same time that I don’t even think of stuff as rock or not rock or hip-hop or whatever.”

Wallows breathe a tenacity and energy into a musical landscape that can sometimes feel barrenly similar—overrun by bands and artists all clamoring to fill the checkboxes of whatever genre they operate in. Minnette, Lemasters, and Preston are not only proof that music is as dynamic and exciting as ever—they also point— not to themselves—but to their contemporaries doing the thing they themselves admire. The trio was born out of an era of music that painted their view of the art as this vibrant, eclectic thing unbound by labels or expectations—and in their minds—that era didn’t disappear with their childhood. Modern cynicism over what is or isn’t good music dissolves amongst Wallows—a sentiment we should all take to heart.

Written by Steven Ward | Photography by Gabriella Hughes | Styling by Abigail Lipp