Tag: Wesley Wolffe

Wesley Wolffe Breaks Fixations on New Single “Words” | Interview

May 16th, 2025

If you have been following this site for a while now, you may have heard the name Wesley Wolffe tossed around at some point. Following the release of his sophomore album Good Kind back at the beginning of 2024, Wolffe’s sweaty and deliberate style of punk music has held a grip on those that have come across it, and those that have been even luckier to have caught the Wesley Wolffe band live in action. Today Wolffe returns with his new single “Words”, the first release he’s offering since his move from New Orleans to Brooklyn as he showcases his new band and marking the first taste of what is going to be a two song EP that he is releasing in full next month.

With a slick pronunciation of the drums, Wolffe’s roughly tempered wail comes through, unfretted and unguarded, as “Words” breaks apart instrumental fixations – shifting from an impenetrable wall to coordinated expositions of harsh post-punk melodies and commanding vocals. Playing with his longtime guitar maestro Jeremy Mock (Face of Ancient Gallery), Wolffe now introduces his latest bandmates Nick Pedroza and Sebi Duzian from Bedridden fame to bust open Wolffe’s dynamic and intuitive sound. “Words” is presented as a bad dream, a contusion of reality and what may lie beyond what we deem the subconscious. But after being diagnosed with OCD, Wolffe finds himself lingering in the paranoia that his brain plays with him, a white knuckled grip, a deck of cards slapped down beyond his command as he runs away, looking for a justification, a plea or an answer to anything that would ease the obsessions.

We recently got to catch up with Wesley Wolffe to talk about playing live with his new band, changing his writing process and how “Words” came to be.

Listen to “Words” premiering here on the ugly hug.

Shea Roney: You have two new songs coming out soon. The first two songs from Wesley Wolffe after you moved to New York. How are you feeling about it all?

WW: I feel pretty excited about it. I kind of have zero expectations for how it’ll do on the Internet just cause I think I had pretty lofty expectations for the last release. So this time, I’m just like, you know, whatever happens, happens.

SR: I know that balancing expectations was a challenge for you the past two album releases you had.

WW: Yeah, whenever I go back and listen, I mean, it’s cool and I really like the songs, but I think after some time passes you can approach your former releases with a clear mind.

SR: Looking back, I mean personally as a fan, I’m putting those records on quite often. But I can imagine them being part of you for so long, obviously anyone looks back and sees them differently. Is there a new light that has been shed on these previous releases?

WW: All the Good Kind songs I don’t really love the recorded version of them that much, but we’re playing a ton of those songs live. And recently, with this band, our live show has gotten really, really tight and much, much more aggressive. It was already pretty aggressive, but now it’s like we’re fully a punk band and we play these songs like a punk band does. And to me, that’s really exciting. So when I watch videos of us performing live in New York, I’m like, ‘oh, this is so fucking cool.’ But then I listen to the recordings, and I’m like, ‘damn it, just doesn’t hit the same’ [laughs]. But that’s also a really cool place to be, because I feel like it’s pretty rare for bands these days to sound better than their recordings, you know?

SR: Your music has always been aggressive, but saying it’s more aggressive live and having that need, that want and that pleasure you get from playing more aggressively, where do you think that comes from?

WW: I think for me, if I go to a show, and I’m watching a band, and they’re kind of just like statues and just sort of standing there, then I’m bored. So if I were to watch a band, I would want them to perform like the way that we perform, because we all move around a ton and scream and get in your face. And it’s also just exciting, like these songs are songs, like we’re not improvising, but the way that we play them now, there is a lot more room for just weird shit to happen. There’s just a new element that’s unpredictable. The way these guys will play it, too, because they’re all professionals, they truly make it their own. So, what happens is we end up playing them just really fucking hard and really fast, just because it’s fun as hell for us. To answer your question, I think it’s just fucking fun.

SR: So your new song “Words”, a lot of our conversations in the past have been about how your writing style has been this sort of detached lens, about these characters, but still aimed at you personally. Is this something that you have continued on as you start writing more songs?

WW: Recently, no. With every new song that I’ve been writing in the past year, I have kind of stepped away from that. Now, “Words” is just about a year and a half old, so the song is about a whole host of things. I’m the main character of the song, but it’s not necessarily about anything that’s ever happened to me before.

I wrote the song first and then wrote the lyrics later. The chords have a flat 5th, or a tritone, for every single chord in it, like an evil interval. The church, back in the day, that interval was banned because they thought it would summon the devil or something. It’s used to evoke a sense of unease, and it’s always one that I gravitate towards when I’m writing songs, because, you know, I feel uneasy a lot. The song is about paranoia and focusing on facial features and trying to read people. It’s like making up all these weird stories in your brain about what people might be thinking of you. The end of the song is about me getting pushed off of a cliff by this group of people because of something that I did, but I don’t know what it was.

SR: Did you allow yourself to follow this paranoia in ways that you didn’t see coming? Or was this story crafted with something you had in your mind previously?

WW: It just all sort of came to me. At that point in my life I was in New Orleans and I just recently got diagnosed with OCD. I was talking to my therapist about it, and just talking about all of the different ways that OCD can manifest itself, and one thing I was worried about was false memory OCD. The paranoia aspect, getting pushed off a cliff and murdered for something that I was unaware of doing was like, maybe I did do something, but I can’t remember it, or like, am I having false memory OCD? What’s the deal here?

SR: You mentioned that you wrote these songs a while ago while you still lived in New Orleans. Now living in New York, do these two songs represent a transitional period for you at all? Are there parts of you and New Orleans still in them, or are you looking to have them be a way to move forward?

WW: I wrote them in the midst of some OCD delusional spells. I think it’s understandable that I’d like to leave that in the past [laughs]. However, as you know, these are issues I’ll most likely continue to battle with for the most of my life. So they remain relevant to me. I see them less as a transition or more of a chapter closing. So I guess a way to move forward is a good way to describe how I feel towards em. These are the last songs I wrote in New Orleans that I plan to release. So I’ll be moving on pretty soon

You can listen to “Words” and Wolffe’s past releases everywhere now. The second single from the EP is set to be released next month.

Written by Shea Roney | Photo by Manon Bushong
Wesley Wolffe Holds Up the Mirror on Good Kind | Feature Interview

May 31st, 2024

Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Wesley Wolffe is a familiar face amongst the New Orleans underground scene, coming into local favoritism playing with bands like STEEF, Sleep Habits and a vast amount of other stellar acts. But on his own, Wolffe spent years secretly molding his own career of brash post-rock and punk antiquity that is garnering some head turns across the country. Earlier this year, Wolffe released his sophomore record, Good Kind, that found him taking his unrestricted and fractured song structures into intense and exciting new territories for the young songwriter. Overgrown with the frustrations of social unproductivity, Wolffe’s writing became a controlled burn – turning what we think we know about ourselves upside down and clearing out the path of human disregard – all within the parameters of his unique and gripping creative lens.

Wolffe unleashed his official self-titled debut album in 2020, solidifying his sound as both a writer and performer. Taking a year off from music during the pandemic, unsettled with both the world and himself, he shares, “I just moved back to New Orleans, and I wasn’t feeling super great, so I just didn’t write anything for a long time. It took much longer than I thought it would to get back in it, but I spent two years writing and settled on seven songs.” This creative breakthrough came with gathering what he learned from his last release, as he reflects, “okay, I’m gonna do this one the right way.”

Taking the songs to Mid-City Studio to record with Matt Seferian (Pope), Good Kind wastes no time in forging its own path. Broken down into individual anecdotes, these songs are seared by the sweaty and compact musicality and unique structure of Wolffe’s instrumental demands. With the accompaniment of his twin brother, Turner Wolffe, on bass and Rob Florence on drums, Good Kind’s strength comes from the moments that waver between full fledged tenacity and the DIY charm that Wolffe commends.

Photo Courtesy of Wesley Wolffe

These days, you don’t have to go far to feel ashamed about being a human. Now that our ability to witness the world can come from our pockets, so does our ability to see how easy it is to hate, destroy and turn a blind eye to what really matters. “I always knew that I wanted to be political with my music,” Wolffe conveys. Like the rest of us during the pandemic, Wolffe was trapped in his room, feeling useless as he could only watch each bit of string that holds us together unravel with ease. “I feel like in that time period when I was writing those songs, the range of emotion that I was feeling was very, very slim. I was just becoming numb to things,” he says. “I think I was just grieving, at the risk of sounding cliché, the loss of youth that I was experiencing as a kid in their early twenties.”

Stark in its deliverance, Good Kind opens with a reminder; “Words are just words when/ Directed towards performance.” “Trinkets”, from the very beginning sets an uneasy distance between words and actions as a frantic guitar falls in line with the band’s heavy drive – Wolffe conducting the arc from a first person perspective. “I’ve never felt a great need for self expression when it comes to my personal relationships and what not,” he admits. “My life is no different than yours. I love and hate in the same way most people do. No one needs my take on those types of things – especially these days.”

Where Wolffe’s writing style sticks out is his ability to detach, leaving his own world views to embody new perspectives of ego, greed and ignorance, something he explains, “I think that’s why I can get into a character. Instead of just giving my perspective on something that’s fucked up, I can try to find a way to give somebody else’s perspective that might be on the wrong side of whatever issue it is.” A grueling task to say the least, to embody those that are taking the world in the wrong direction, becomes a game of observation, performance, and then reflection. “I feel like I need to hold a mirror up to them so that’s why my songs are in the first person,” he says. “Writing like this isn’t necessarily grounding – it can be exhausting and I’d like to think it’s challenging for the listener as well.”

“I didn’t kill no one/ All this talk of funds/ Ask me if I care,” is a hell of an opening line. “Streets” is one of the most pivotal songs in Wolffe’s repertoire, thriving in a hostile demeanor that the band creates with their unfeigned performance. Yet Wolffe’s attunement to this character, with such deadpan candor, is striking when taking the gravity of this plea – as we witness ignorance and the implementation of wrongdoing beginning to melt and mold down into a targeted vendetta. Songs like “Good Kind” and “About Me” are love letters to personal greed and being indifferent to the suffering that follows in suit. “Am I hurting you with my silence?,” he sings on the song “Boulder”, a song of manipulation and distrust, and a line that takes the cake when it comes to provocative cluelessness.

“I guess it’s not far off for me to to think of myself in that way as well – to be like a really fucked up narcissist guy,” Wolffe admits, “so it’s interesting to tap into that world and write a song about it and then it can just exist.” In no way is it idolization, but a satirization of how people continually miss the mark of what it means to be human. Good Kind becomes an exercise of holding ourselves accountable in our daily actions – observe, perform and reflect. For as hard it can be to admit, we all have moments of ignorance towards our faults – and in a way, Wolffe holds the mirror to us as well – to break the loop between performance and real action that can make all the difference.

Wesley Wolffe is donating all the proceeds of his bandcamp purchases to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund which you can purchase here. For more information on how you can donate, head to their website that is linked above. You can also purchase a CD of Good Kind through New Orleans-based label, Kiln Recordings.

Tag: Wesley Wolffe

Wesley Wolffe Breaks Fixations on New Single “Words” | Interview

Wesley Wolffe Holds Up the Mirror on Good Kind | Feature Interview