Wye Oak w/Palm

×

Expand

Wye Oak

Wye Oak has never been afraid to mess with a winning formula. On their earliest records, the Baltimore-born indie-rock band laced their spine-chilling dream-pop with some blistering guitar riffs from singer Jenn Wasner. That guitar was the defining quality of 2011’s masterful Civilian, the album that introduced Wye Oak to a bigger audience than ever, but for 2014’s divisive follow-up Shriek, Wasner abandoned the guitar completely, letting her bass and drummer Andy Stack’s thick synthesizers carry the record. 2016’s Tween split the difference between those two albums (it was comprised of eight songs the band wrote then shelfed between the two) but this year’s wonderful new The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs mines new muses altogether. Forgoing the murky, mysterious sounds of its predecessors, it spotlights some of the band’s brightest, most direct songwriting yet.