Premiere: Listen: Wanderlings Unveil New ‘VNO’ EP

Buddies with Childhood and Only Real, with heady goals of their own to boot, Nottingham escapists Wanderlings have spent the past year or so building up to the release of their ‘VNO’ EP. It’s available to listen to in full first on DIY.

Stacking up on top of the previously unveiled ‘Just Another (Recurring Dream)’, these previously sharp, angular guitar talents have rooted towards a dreamier, spaced-out sound, this being the final piece in the puzzle. The band have never sounded so assured, confident of where they’re heading.

Listen to the EP in full below on the day of its release on Viscerality Records. Cassettes will be made available at the band’s forthcoming live shows. Order on iTunes and read DIY’s interview with the band below the player.



There was a fair bit of chatter about you guys this time last year - did you want to refine & perfect this EP before making a next step?
It wasn’t necessarily a case of refining the songs themselves; more a process of selecting the tracks that we felt would work best on VNO. Initially we were toying with the idea of releasing an album, the tracks being all pretty much written around that time, but after some deliberating and spider diagramming we felt that a selection of these songs would work well as a fledgling slice of VNO shaped pie…

What does ‘VNO’ stand for?
Dark rooms and colourful forms shimmering on the walls. Shallow breaths and heartbeats. It’s an acronym we used when we were writing a lot of material that had the same themes threaded through our new ideas. I guess we always wanted people to project upon it whatever they wished, letting the mind wander(lings) a bit.

There’s a real emphasis on dreaminess with these songs - was a long, dazed summer required to write these kind of tracks?
Not necessarily a summer, but the dazed part kinda helps! Whether it’s descending fog or melting sunsets, it’s that feeling of being in a womb-esque environment that really gets us pouring ideas out. An attack on the senses from any trajectory, colours and sounds, it’s all soaked up and used in some form.

Did you have any stumbling blocks with putting this EP together or was it a quick burst of songwriting?
The songwriting was all done very quickly, we just wrote so much in such a short space of time that the only real stumbling block was working out what to do with everything! When we had seemingly settled on the tracks we wanted to use we’d end up writing more and then having to think about it all again. Which is obviously not a bad problem to have, to be creating so much, but it did maybe delay the release of VNO a bit.

‘Los Dias’ is a big, sprawling closer. How did that one come together?
It was initially quite a fragile demo of James’, which we would usually end up jamming out at the end of the night. And it was always cathartic, everyone pouring in a lot of different ideas and sounds, until we were mere husks. A last attempt at trying to rescue a lost soul, before it’s too late. Something beguiling can always be extracted from a situation, regardless of the outcome. We like that thought.