Interview Wunderhorse: Golden Touch

“I think a lot of music now is almost just like a soundtrack for the personal brand that people are selling,” muses Jacob Slater, frontman and founder of the Wunderhorse project. “A lot of energy is focused around presenting an image of yourself to the world that people can buy into. [The music] almost becomes a secondary thing, which I think is bullshit.” We’re sat in a Soho pub alongside guitarist Harry Fowler, drummer Jamie Staples, and bassist Pete Woodin, having toasted a round of four Cokes and a Guinness (the latter being Jacob’s) after wrapping on DIY’s nearby shoot. “We’re really trying to keep the music front and centre; that’s what we’ve spent our lives working on,” the vocalist continues. “We haven’t spent our lives working on, you know, marketing ourselves to a bunch of teenagers.”

Even a cursory glance over Wunderhorse’s online presence confirms as much. Their Twitter (or X) is strictly business only; their Instagram grid is dominated by live shots, not editorial (or, god forbid, selfies), and though they do have an account, you’re about as likely to catch them doing TikTok tour vlogs as you are pigs flying. In person, there’s nothing strikingly curated about them either – they self-confessedly hate having their pictures taken, and the only sartorial clue as to their day job is Jamie’s custom Wunderhorse signet ring (“My brother got it for me,” he smiles, slightly sheepishly).

“I think what we’re trying to do is just present the band visually in the most honest way,” Pete says of their deliberately no-frills approach to social media. “A lot of the promo stuff is about pushing people to come to a live show: ‘There’s something happening – come and see it if you want’. I guess that’s a reconcilable way to play that game.” “We’ve got a lot of help ‘playing the game’ now too,” acknowledges Jamie. “When we didn’t have [a management team]…” he trails off and laughs. “We basically weren’t doing it.” Harry, too, is in agreement with his bandmates: “You can do your best to make [the online presence] somewhat aligned with who you are or what you believe in, but it’s not the real thing. The music’s the real thing, at the end of the day.”

For Jacob, the music world was hardly alien – he’d already fronted the cult South London band Dead Pretties, who burned like a Roman candle before combusting in 2017. But, as he now explains, “I think I was a bit wet behind the ears doing ‘Cub’. I think it was just a collection of songs that I felt I had to exorcise out of myself. ‘Cub’ was fine… but if I could go back, I’d have made it sound a lot different. It was a bit overproduced for me, a bit polished.”

Having enlisted longtime friends Jamie, Pete, and Harry to complete Wunderhorse, the four set out to tour ‘Cub’ – a stint that would ultimately see them sell out venues across the UK and make their Glastonbury debut on the festival’s Woodsies Stage, alongside those aforementioned big-ticket support slots. While on the road, they quickly formed a natural chemistry; soon, it became evident that the boys weren’t just Jacob’s fellow performers, but rather his soon-to-be writing partners. “I think we started to elevate those songs up from the recordings, and that was probably the beginning of us becoming a band,” recalls Pete of the dynamic shift. “Then when [Jacob] brought ‘Arizona’ into the rehearsal room, we all just found our parts within the first five minutes. We all knew exactly what we were playing and it kind of fell into place.”

‘Midas’, then, feels in many ways like “the first proper Wunderhorse record” – the inaugural statement from the band as a unit. And, true to their origins, it keeps their incendiary live energy firmly front and centre. “I think for all of us, that’s where the vitality in our music can be heard best – when we’re playing balls to the wall without much regard for perfection,” Jacob nods. And, to jump from one fable to another, this determinedly raw approach means that any whispers of the emperor’s new clothes are easily refuted; with ‘Midas’, Wunderhorse have nowhere to hide.

The results of said parameters are ten tracks that simply haven’t had the opportunity to be overwrought and are, consequently, (almost) as raw on tape as they would be in the rehearsal room. ‘Arizona’ is structured around a midsection of biting riffs, yet lyrically recalls ‘60s musician Peter Sarstedt, its “Where do you go to my love?” refrain imbuing the track’s instrumental heft with a kind of bittersweet desperation. ‘Cathedrals’, too, casts beauty and destruction as two sides of the same coin, a stadium-sized testament to the all-encompassing possession of romantic obsession.

Indeed, throughout the album, there’s a sense that the band never entirely trust anything – or anyone – to deliver on what’s promised. And in consistently muddying ‘Midas’’ emotional waters, they build a portfolio of strikingly nuanced personalities, between whom the key commonality is, Jacob says with a wry smile, that “they’re all broken”. There’s the title track’s eponymous figure, sketched as “somebody who makes you feel powerless and small, like you’re a little chess piece on their board”. By track three, this outline gains another dimension – that of an manipulative puppet-master, pulling the strings of the industry that ‘Emily’’s narrator is so sick of; “This apple is crawling with worms,” Jacob decries on the latter, his sandpaper vocals softening slightly to a Kurt Cobain drawl.

Elsewhere, we meet the insidious smooth-talker of ‘Silver’, his cold self-acceptance almost the direct inverse of the Radiohead-like ‘Superman’’s protagonist, adrift and yearning to be recognised. “I hadn’t thought about it like that, but I like it,” Jacob muses when we put this to him. “I write the lyrics, but I think the music we make together informs what is then written. So it’s this amalgamation of all of us that creates this character, and I guess all of the songs are from [their] perspective. It’s like that record by The Who, ‘Quadrophenia’ – I don’t know how many sides this character has.”

It’s a multifaceted portrait that encodes a degree of trepidation towards relationships both personal and professional – the latter perhaps an unsurprising feeling given that, post-Dead Pretties, Jacob upped sticks and moved to Cornwall, away from the smoke and mirrors of the London music scene. Now, though, he’s found himself back in the capital, signed to a top management company with one acclaimed album under his belt and an imminent second on his hands. As a band, how do they reconcile Wunderhorse’s increasing participation in and their evident distaste for the industry circus?

“I think I’m all for ‘Midas’ and Wunderhorse being successful, definitely,” Jacob says with a smile. “But I think I’m maybe slightly cynical about the world you have to exist in to achieve those goals. And it’s that cynicism, I think, that maybe keeps you safe.” Harry nods: “It’s quite important to make sure that the band doesn’t become your entire life. There are other things that we like to do with our time, things we enjoy where there are no…” he pauses, choosing his words, “expectations.”

But, while Wunderhorse doesn’t define them as individuals, it does epitomise them as musicians, and the four aren’t yet so cynical as to feel disillusioned with their work; for all the noise around social media and digital communities (both pseudo-necessary evils, in their view), playing live is still the lifeblood of it all. “There’s nothing to hide behind. It’s like, ‘You better be fucking good tonight’,” Jacob shrugs. “People pay for a fucking ticket. I want them to go home feeling like they’ve experienced something good; that they’ve seen a band at the height of their power, doing what they do best.” And that, as anyone who’s seen Wunderhorse live can attest, is exactly what they achieve.


‘Midas’ is out 30th August via Communion.

Tags: Features, Interviews, From The Magazine, July/​August 2024, Wunderhorse