While the concept of a “sophomore slump” has become a cliché at this point, there’s significantly less talk about the sense of complacency that begins to set in around an artist’s fourth album, when everything has begun to feel a bit formulaic in the process of writing and recording music. Even for a band that’s as aggressively experimental as Wombo—a consistently hard-to-define trio bringing a slacker-rock demeanor and contradictory technicality to post-punk aesthetics—can find themselves caught in a production loop of their own creation.
Their fourth album Danger in Fives aims to snap out of that cycle with a collection of songs born of spontaneity, embellished over years of live performance, and otherwise created as collage-like compositions merging jagged pieces one wouldn’t expect to fit so perfectly, all while occasionally paying explicit homage to the Louisville band’s back catalog. It’s essentially the end product of all of bassist/vocalist Sydney Chadwick, guitarist Cameron Lowe, and percussionist Joel Taylor’s basest musical instincts after being turned inside-out by three artists determined to permanently alter the course of their ideas nearly a decade into releasing music together.
With the record out now via Fire Talk, stream along and read Lowe’s track-by-track breakdown of the LP below, in which he describes how all 11 of these recordings came together. You can also order a copy of the record here.
1. “Danger in Fives”
This one was born very spontaneously and an unusually large number of original ideas are on the album version.
2. “S.T. Tilted”
It’s the first song we wrote after the Slab EP that made it on the record. We weren’t sure it was going to work, but all the contrasting parts ended up being cool. It’s rare for a Wombo song to be written on guitar first like this one, with some of the bass and drum parts jammed out in the basement afterward. The wacky guitar part came last.
3. “Cloud 36”
This one was one of the anchor songs which we built the record around. We played it live for a year before tracking, so it has all the benefits and challenges of that approach.
4. “Ugly Room”
This was the last song we wrote for the record. Its lyrics are related to our song “Spyhopping,” because it has ideas that are cut short and chopped—train-of-thought kinda thing.
5. “A Dog Says”
Another anchor song which we built the record around. It was just some interesting ideas for a while, and then we worked on it on the road and filled it out to make it more of a song. Parts of it are an homage to our song “Black Hole Sun II” from Blossomlooksdownuponus.
6. “Neon Bog”
This one came out of a commitment to make things regularly with no expectations or pressure. We tracked a lot of quick melodies, two of which are the takes that remain: the distorted vocals, which were dropped on the guitar amp simulator track by mistake but sounded really good, and the third vocal part, which has a great collage-like feeling because it was from the original exploration take Sydney made when we started working on it.
7. “Reveal Dusty”
We were exploring new ways of writing, and as we wrote melodies on this one we wondered, “What if you took a moment from our song ‘Snakey’ and described the setting?” Also, the vocal take we used was also the first take we captured.
8. “Really Melancholy and There Are No Words”
Sydney came up with this spontaneously after rehearsing “Reveal Dusty.” It just fit so well in an abstract way, and I’m really glad it worked out that it’s sandwiched between the two sister tracks on the record. When we recorded it, our engineer Nick Roeder really worked hard to get different sounds out of the bass and vocals, and it was all captured through speakers in the room. I’m glad we stylized it so much, because it helps bridge the electronic sounds and live sounds on the record.
9. “Spyhopping”
This started as another digital composition and the twin of “Reveal Dusty,” sharing the same beat. Interestingly the vocal melodies were written with a different bass line, so the original context was completely different. The middle verse vocal melody was chopped up like samples and rearranged, and then Sydney learned that melody and sang it in real time. It sorta twists over top of itself in an interesting way with the lyrics.
10. “Common Things”
The only song on the record that was made from Sydney writing solo on acoustic guitar, which we then translated into a full band composition.
11. “Garden Spies”
This song is a mix of mundane memories from childhood blended with dreams.
