“A lot of the time nowadays pop records are very on the grid”: Wallows on embracing the weird, and Fender Strats
For a lot of bands, life would be easier if they could always rely on the Ramones paradigm: the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Instead, it requires work.
READ MORE: Fender Player II Stratocaster HSS review – the only Strat you’ll ever need?
Take Wallows, for example. In recent years the Los Angeles trio have moved from actors-with-a-hobby status to bonafide indie stardom and TikTok ubiquity, with the step up to headlining arenas across North America in their immediate future. The change part, then, is easy to get a handle on. It’s the staying the same bit that they had to fight for while assembling Model, their recently released third album.
Beneath the LP’s synth washes and waves of oddball effects, that effort is readily apparent. In the stabbing power chords that open Anytime, Always, and the jerking, New York 2001 guitars of Your Apartment, there are moments that carry the obvious immediacy of kids playing around with a guitar, a bass and a drum kit in someone’s living room. “That’s who we are at our core,” observes multi-instrumentalist Cole Preston, who has been playing with guitarist-vocalists Braeden Lemasters and Dylan Minnette – a former child actor and star of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, respectively – since 2011.
Image: Press
Adding to the feeling that Wallows have doubled back on themselves in order to take their next step forward is the presence of producer John Congleton. Having worked with Ariel Rechtshaid on 2022’s sleek Tell Me That It’s Over, here they reconnected with the man who helped bring their comparatively scratchy breakout debut Nothing Happens to life back in 2019. Congleton’s influence – from his Jack in the Box approach to guitar treatments to his fondness for weirdo loops – is all over Model, dressing its bones in popping colour.
Get Weird
Some of that, the band say, is down to their shared belief that everything should sound human. Congleton came on board early in the process, having almost accidentally hit upon the same impulses that the Wallows camp were keen to follow. “He definitely doesn’t sweat the small stuff,” Preston says. “If there’s some unique or weird thing that happened in a take, he’ll just leave it in there. It’s not like he’s on Beat Detective making it all perfect. I feel like a lot of the time nowadays pop records are very on the grid.”
“We had a writing session with John maybe six months prior to when we actually started recording,” he continues. “We asked him what he imagined for our third album, just out of curiosity. We had no plans for doing it with anybody, really. Everything he said about where we’re at, and where we could go next, really made sense to us. It was what we were all talking about separately from him. It definitely made it easier – we knew how he operated. We got to skip the formalities and the little kindnesses.”
Image: Press
This might all be true but the picture presented to Congleton once they convened in the studio – largely at Sunset Sound in LA – had changed in one important way. Preston, who had previously been regarded chiefly as the band’s drummer, was now firmly a third guitarist as well. “We all write, too,” Lemasters observes. “So if we need a guitar part, it’s ‘Cole, what do you got?’ I’ll go for 15 minutes trying to think of something cool, Dylan will. If anything, it’s just more room for something to land, you know?”
Equally, this dynamic opened up further avenues for the group and Congleton to pull out those characterful moments – the punch-drunk accents on I Wouldn’t Mind, or the plucked, beachy cool of She’s An Actress. “It’s nice to have those perspectives,”
Lemasters continues. “Each player has a slightly different feel. Sometimes I want Cole or Dylan to play a guitar part I wrote, just because I’m already playing something, or maybe there’s a reason why Cole should play all the guitars, or I should.”
Keep It Lean
In balancing these different voices, Model becomes most interesting as a textural work. Wallows are, fundamentally, a melody-driven band, but running alongside that is a cool sort of tension created by the fact that they’re trying to get their ideas across without things getting bloated. There is an appreciation for space here that feels completely new within their sound. “It’s really fun to keep adding layers but, at some point, they start to overshadow the part that you originally wrote,” Lemasters says. “But when does that happen? I remember, on A Warning, I was like, ‘Maybe we should add another melody at the end, a guitar or a synth.’ It’s already got three melodies going on. Maybe not.”
Helping with this process was the get-it-and-move-on nature of the sessions. They might have had the best part of two months together, which Preston describes as a “luxurious” amount of time, but they tracked something like 25 songs before whittling what they had down to a pretty economical 12 in 38 minutes. “You spend a day or two on something and then you have to move on,” he says. “It felt like ‘make the decision and then forget about it’. Then, a week later, you reopen that project and you’re like, ‘Actually, it sounds great, or, it needs this.’ You achieved a little perspective just because you’re moving so fast.”
Ohio Players
Fittingly, given their recent involvement as faces of Fender’s Player II series, both Lemasters and Preston got their start with Strats – Braeden with a Mexican model and Cole with a Squier. “My dad’s an amazing guitar player and my first memory of music is him playing shows back in Ohio, where I grew up, with local bands,” Lemasters says. “He was playing his white 1999 Stratocaster and I remember being like, ‘Wow that’s such a cool guitar.’ And then I would see Jimi Hendrix playing that guitar, and then I would see George Harrison with his sonic blue Stratocaster.”
Lemasters’ main guitar on Model – a black Rickenbacker 360 – can also trace its roots back to this formative time. He’s been trying to find a project that fitted its tone since picking it up post-Nothing Happens and here, finally, was his chance. “A big reason I play the guitars I play is because I’ve seen my favourite guitar players play them,” he says. “Johnny Marr plays the Rick, and then I want to get the Rick.”
Image: Press
Also in their rotation during sessions was a Thurston Moore signature Jazzmaster owned by Congleton, while Minnette played a lot of bass – a P-Bass and a Gibson Grabber, specifically. Preston turned to an old Supro for select parts. “We would play through Braeden’s pedals and the same amp configuration,” Preston says. “It’s mostly old Boss things – an RV-2, the red delay [DM-2] – and a Ten Years Decade pedal, which is modelled off a Peavey Decade. That’s always on, even live, it’s always on.”
“At Sunset Sound there’s the control room, the tracking room and then there’s a couple of iso booths with all the guitar amps,” he continues. “John had [multiple] set up at once capturing one performance. It was Braeden’s pedals hitting a split into, like, an old Champ and a more standard 70s Deluxe Reverb. John would then pick which one [he wanted]. The Champ was always more distorted, the Reverb was always more clean sounding. I don’t think we’ve ever done that before. I thought it was cool that, instead of double-tracking a lot of the time, he would just mute different combinations of amps and direct sounds.”
Road Dogs
After we’re done talking, Wallows are set to start rehearsals for a tour that will pull them in a few different directions. Bolstered by three touring musicians, the challenge is not only to chop up Model’s constituent pieces but do so in a way that allows them to actually, you know, be engaging performers. “I feel like there’s half of the record that’s pretty straightforward in that way,” Preston says. “The song Calling After Me is a representation of that live, where it’s drums, bass, guitars, and done. It’s super simple, everybody has one part to play and that’s it. And then there are songs like Going Under, where we did take more creative liberties in the studio.”
“Figuring that out is going to be tricky but this time around we’re running some minor playbacks to fill in the space, they’ll be time coded with the light show for the first time. We don’t lean too heavily on the tracks, it’s mostly just playing to a click for the lights. Some of these songs are definitely going to take on a different form where we have less layers, so therefore we can play it more energetically. I think Going Under will be that way, where we all play to the maximum dynamic, you know? It hasn’t been too hard so far – six people is quite a lot. I’m curious to dig in.”
But amid all that he says something that sounds antithetical to this level of thought: “We’ll just wing it.” In keeping with the spirit that drove Model, though,it’s probably important to keep that feeling alive for as long as possible. Things in Wallows’ world aren’t going to stop changing any time soon. It’s up to them to try to stay the same.
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