“LIFE’S NOT ALWAYS A BIG MOVIE MOMENT, SOMETIMES IT’S JUST REALLY FUCKING MESSY”
WYSE on grief, new love, and why their new EP Revelations refuses to tidy any of it up.
WYSE describes their sound as “if Radiohead, Bjork, and the Cranberries had a Gayby.” Everything else you need to know about them follows pretty naturally from that.
The Manchester-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has a new EP out called Revelations, and it is the most unguarded thing they’ve made. They’ve coined their own genre for it: dreamclash alternative. “It plays between being quite dreamy and then there will be sort of surprising moments that are quite big and epic and loud,” they explain.
They started performing at 16 in Portsmouth, solo acoustic, and spent years moving around before landing in Manchester. Portsmouth made sense on paper, roots and all that, but as WYSE puts it: “if you’re not really in the inner circle of it, it’s quite difficult.” Manchester was a different story. A couple of days after moving, they went to a bar called Whiskey Jar, which has live music every night and an audience that actually pays attention. “Everyone listens to the music even though it looks like it should be this rowdy bar.” They played there recently and knew immediately they’d made the right call.
“I just realised that I don’t have to be anything.”
Revelations was written at a strange crossing point. WYSE had just broken from their immediate family after giving them a choice about whether to support them in their sexuality. Their father was a vicar, and growing up with identity confusion in that household was not easy. “It was something that was frowned upon in my household.” The family didn’t come through. That relationship is over.
At the same time, WYSE started dating Hanna. “There was this really weird time where this whole era of my life had ended, and then this new beautiful but very very fucking terrifying one was just beginning.”
The EP holds all of that without tidying it up. Holding On is built from, in WYSE’s words, “the grief and the anger and the resentment from my upbringing and walking away from my family.” Then there are Slowly Does It and Steady Like The Sun, which WYSE calls “probably the happiest songs I’ve ever written,” before adding: “but of course in true WYSE fashion they’re not truly happy because they also embody fear and also courage for what’s to come.” The message underneath all of it is not a neat one. “Life’s not always this like big amazing movie moment; sometimes it’s just really fucking messy.”
Steady Like The Sun starts somewhere close to calm and ends in a full orchestral blowout with a guitar solo that earns every second of it. That solo, like every solo on this EP, was written and recorded by WYSE. That’s new.
Someone told them when they were younger that people who look like them look strange playing electric guitar. “I kind of embedded that in my head and just thought, oh this isn’t my job, this is your job.” For years they’d write solos into demos and hand them to bandmate Dom to record or write. On Revelations they scrapped that entirely. “I decided to just completely scrap that in this EP and embrace my technical abilities on the guitar and really just celebrate it.”
The influences behind those solos run from Eric Johnson, whose playing WYSE says they “absolutely love,” to Anna Calvi, whose rawness they find genuinely inspiring. WYSE specifically wanted the experience of playing a big classic rock riff, landing a solo, and it not being a man doing it.
