Midway through this interview with his bandmates, Wytches drummer Gianni Honey bursts through the door of Otto’s Shrunken Head in lower Manhattan more than a little worse for wear. His two bandmates haven’t seen him since the previous night’s gig.
“I’ve just come from Harlem!” Honey says. “I went with three random guys and some girl, stayed at some guy’s place. I’m still drunk, by the way. My hangover’s gonna be epic when it kicks in.”
Clearly, things are as they should be for a young, loud, hairy British trio reaching the end of its first North American tour. The three-week trek with Cloud Nothings and/or Metz included such eye-opening experiences as seeing people on the street injecting heroin in Vancouver — “We’d never seen anything like that, it was really dark,” singer/guitarist Kristian Bell says — driving through the Arizona desert — “I could feel my skin cooking,” says bassist Dan Rumsey — and, less dramatically, many friendly fans’ couches, floors and guest rooms, accommodations the band often solicits from the stage.
“I ask after the loudest applause,” Bell says. “‘I hate to be that guy, but can we stay at your house?’ It worked every night.”
The band has largely followed the DIY path during its existence, which began when Bell and Honey moved to Brighton from their hometown (the indelibly named Yaxley, near Peterborough) in 2011, and connected with Rumsey after he was the only one to answer their ad for a bassist. But in the U.K., where the hype machine is dramatically compressed, the band found itself getting rave reviews and performing at festivals and with acts like Japandroids and Drenge with just a couple of singles under their belts. Here, they’ve gotten feverish responses from Pitchfork, Spin, NPR (who are premiering the group’s debut LP, Annabel Dream Reader, on First Listen), MTV, Vice and others.
That’s partially because their dark and scrawny sound — a seething cauldron of grunge, metal, surf and psych-rock that at times evokes a doomier Arctic Monkeys — is strikingly different from most of their peers. Singer/guitarist/main songwriter Bell says, “My dad was massive into ’70s rock — Sabbath, Deep Purple, Bad Company — but Nirvana were the first band I found on my own. Not many people were into [grunge] at my school so I held it close.” Shades of all those bands can be heard in Annabel Dream Reader, but its Aug. 26 release was still a month away at the time of this interview, and the band members still seem a bit perplexed by why people are so interested in talking to them.
“Is it like, nothing goes down in America until you’ve got an album out?” Rumsey asks. “I think I prefer that. It’s a bit weird [getting a lot of attention] just off of a couple of 45s.”
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Wytches are a young band, and they’re not all young — Rumsey is 29, Honey 24, Bell just 21. But they’re so of-a-piece that the age difference is surprising. “We can all be incredibly immature,” Honey says.
Yet the “m”-word can be heard in the newer, more introspective album tracks like “Weights and Ties” and “Summer Again.” Bell says that’s probably the direction his songwriting will follow next — not that there’s a master plan beyond U.K. tour dates that will carry them into December.
“Hopefully we’ll do three albums and that’s it — leave with a little integrity,” he says of the future. “We don’t want to drag it out. But we’re getting way ahead of ourselves [talking about it].”
Honey brings the conversation back into the present with a resounding thud. “I just want my own flat!”