Forth Wanderers make music that sounds like what growing up feels like. Not the lust and angst and heartbreak that get all the limelight, but the quietly messy business of figuring out what you want and realizing you might need to shake some old habits to get there. Built on clambering guitars and vocalist Ava Trilling’s detached alto, both debut album Tough Love and recent EP Slop are low on dramatic twists and high on the sort of internal scrutiny that whirrs into high gear in the middle of the night.
So far, the Montclair, New Jersey quintet’s path has played out like a study hall daydream: a group of childhood friends form a rock band, self-release an album, and—with a little luck—suddenly find Lorde tweeting their EP out to her 4-million-or-so followers. Now signed to Father/Daughter records, they’re cramming a tour along the East Coast into their college winter breaks, because they’re all dedicated full-time students as well. Though their records play like a soundtrack to suburban restlessness, they couldn’t be any less restless right now.
“The hardest part about the band right now is that we’re all really spread out,” says guitarist and founder Ben Guterl, who’s been putting off interview requests to focus on his third-year finals at Oberlin. His bandmates are scattered between Rutgers, Tufts, and The New School. It’s a complicated balance, but college and the band aren’t entirely at odds; Slop actually started as a way to fulfill Oberlin’s requirement for a winter term project. “I was like, let’s record 4 songs. That’s doable. We’ll just grind it out,” he says. “That didn’t happen. We got drum and guitar and bass tapes we didn’t even use, just a partially finished record, and then we had to go back to school, and nothing really happened for 3 months.”
When the whole band reunited in Montclair for the summer, they buckled down to finish recording. Guterl describes the town’s location on the outskirts of New York City as the ideal setting for a young band finding its way, giving them access to the city’s opportunities while building them up in a more supportive local community. “The Montclair scene was a whole other beast when I was in high school. Playing music, everyone was kind of feeding off each other. The bands I really started listening to when I first was getting into music were all kids that were older than me in high school. Pinegrove was one of them. We played a bunch of shows with Pinegrove in a basement for years before they exploded.”
They finished mixing and mastering halfway midway through the summer, but that’s when the EP hit its biggest snag. With the offer from Father/Daughter records on the table, Forth Wanderers added two fairly unconventional ingredients into the DIY equation: parents and lawyers. “I was pretty naive… Everyone just told me ‘You don’t want to get your music stolen!’, which is crazy, because the contracts are so low stakes,” he says. “So we hired this legit lawyer, this music industry real lawyer, and she charged us real-time prices, and we spent all of our money on it and it’s really not worth it.”
The process took so long to finalize that by the time the EP was released, they’d been working on it for almost two years. After spending so much time focused on just 4 songs, Guterl says that the whole band connects with the music differently than they did when it was first written. “We all trusted ourselves that we, at one point, thought the songs were good. But it was just so long, I had to run through so much shit… That usually happens, we get tired of stuff by the time we release it, and then come back to it later and it’s like ‘Oh, this is not bad.’ ”
The tour ahead gives them time to reconnect with the EP, but they’re already moving forward again, putting the finishing touches on a new full-length album that they hope to release later this year. “We’d never worked that fast before. I think that made it sound a lot better. We just worked on it nonstop,” he says. If this is what slacker rock looks like in 2017, an auspicious year awaits.
Catch Forth Wanderers tonight at Great Scott along with Half Waif and Brittle Brian. The 18+ show starts at 9. Tickets are $10 in advance or $12 at the door.