In Sarah Ruhl’s play, “The Clean House,” the character Halsted confesses, “I loved her to the point of invention.” Similarly, for The Wrecks, music is their muse. Once out of necessity, their inventive DIY approach has become a defining aspect of their creative identity and a welcomed challenge for frontman Nick Anderson.
“For whatever reason, it feels like every production I do, it’s only interesting if it’s kind of a challenge, if there’s a bit of a puzzle to solve,” Anderson explained in a press conference with ECHO and 1824.
The band’s latest project, “INSIDE:”, was perhaps their most complex puzzle yet. After the cathartic release of their album “Sonder,” Anderson found himself creatively drained. “For me, lyrics come first. So it doesn’t matter how cool the instrumentals or melodies are that I’m writing, if I don’t have a meaning or something real attached to it, I don’t know what to do with it.”
Over the next two years, Anderson cycled through a loop of writing, scrapping everything, and starting over. “I just kept going. I just kept trying. And it just kept not working, until it did,” Anderson explained.
The missing piece was hiding in plain sight.
“The record ended up becoming about that kind of isolation and about a lot of self-realizations about what happens when you spend enough time with yourself,” he shared.
Anderson continued, “the record “INSIDE:” is about being locked away for so long, the outside world eventually starts growing in through the cracks of the walls because Mother Nature is trying to make the score even or something. You can spend so much time indoors that it feels like foliage literally starts creeping in through the cracks and almost reaching out.”
This feeling comes to life in the visual for the track “Speed.” After his roommates’ leases ended, Anderson was left with a house full of empty rooms. Instead of feeling lonely, Anderson saw opportunity. “I’m looking at this four bedroom house that’s empty and I have no roommates and I’m like, okay, so that sucks. But how often do I have a house to myself to just make arts and crafts in all the rooms? So I decided to take this opportunity to build out the set.”
Anderson toyed around with Rube Goldberg laundry shoot machines and vacuuming turf in his living room, and with the support of label and an amazing production team, they brought “INSIDE:” to life.
This April, The Wrecks are finally bringing “INSIDE:” out and hitting the road on their “INSIDE: OUTSIDE” Tour. Anderson promises fans “a good show….Best night of your lives, probably, mostly. And probably a bit of shrubbery on stage, a bit of tomfoolery, if you will,” overall “an extension of “INSIDE:” though to the stage.”
Though the setlist hasn’t been finalized yet, and will likely evolve along the way, fans are having a say in what gets played. “We had a setlist debate with our Discord community. The recommenders, and they recommended all of their setlist things and we debated them like one v one, like band versus fans, and then fans went against each other on the Discord and they made arguments for something. It was pretty brutal and pretty awesome…there was certainly some staples on our set that maybe we’ll be making our way out because we were convinced pretty hard by some fans what they think that we should be playing, and they made some great arguments…It was like great to hear that point of view cause we can hypothesize why certain songs do well or show certain shows work and the pacing works. But being able to just tap in once in while…to take the temperature, and get some perspective.”
As the tour’s name suggests, there’s more to come. “OUTSIDE,” the follow-up to “INSIDE:,” will drop later this year. Though the two albums are deeply connected, Anderson never set out to release them in parts. Instead, it was a creative response to one of the challenges that Anderson is so brilliant at solving.
“There’s a of things that I needed to distill, like really understand and put into something and not have 40 things I was staring at to finish. So I kind of told everyone I can’t finish a record right now, but I can finish half a record really clearly. And the moment I said that, everything got exciting again and wasn’t so scary and so frustrating and confusing because I realized I wasn’t trying to live multiple different lives at once while making this record.”
From the inside out, The Wrecks have found their place in the puzzle, a space shaped by reinvention, resilience, and the kind of creativity that only comes from figuring it out as you go.
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