Wallows ‘Let Go’ of Anxious Tendencies to Make Their New Album
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Their album isn’t out yet, but the boys of Wallows are ready to play it live. In arenas.
Rolling Stone can exclusively announce that Wallows — the alt-rock band made up of Dylan Minnette, Braeden Lemasters, and Cole Preston — will release its third album Model on May 24. On the 12-track LP, the trio lets go of the “anxious tendencies” of their past music, resulting in what they believe is their lightest project yet.
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“We want this to be the most approachable album we’ve made. I want people to put this on if they’re not really a fan of us, and be gripped immediately,” Minnette tells Rolling Stone. “We don’t want to take too much of their attention, but we want to keep it. We keep them the whole time and make them want to come back.”
For Model, Wallows reconnected with John Congleton, who produced the group’s breakthrough album Nothing Happens (which included “Are You Bored Yet?“) back in 2019. The band says Congleton envisioned the same thing they had in mind for Model.
“It felt familiar, but John is really good at pushing us and being honest,” says Preston. “He feels like a fourth band member when we’re in the studio. It felt like old times, but we’ve matured and we have more experience. It was old times, but leveled up.”
It’s been five years since Nothing Happens, and Lemasters explains that with other Wallows projects, he’d catch himself nitpicking over small aspects of songs.
“I was always freaking out. I think this is the first album where I just put the music on and said, ‘This sounds great.’ I don’t have any anxiety about it,” says Lemasters. “I’m not overthinking it at all [anymore]. I’m just happy with the instincts we had in the studio and the way that it all turned out.”
“We’ve let go of any anxious tendencies that we used to have,” adds Preston. “We’ve learned to loosen up and embrace instincts.”
The process of making Model was also a complete shift from how they made their last album, Tell Me That It’s Over, which Preston jokes was a “long, drawn out, 10-month soul-crushing process low-key.”
This time, they pumped out all the songs they could in seven weeks — and were happy with all of them. (They made 25 songs. Twelve made the final album, though they hint that there may be variants with extra songs.)
“We let go of these pressures of what all the powers that be around us want from us and just ended up focusing on what we do and what we wanted, and it resulted in an album that very much came us,” says Minnette. “It’s the most fresh we’ve been.”
“It resulted in a very honest and authentic album from us,” Preston says. “It’s perfectly imperfect.”
“I’ll say it’s imperfectly perfect!” laughs Lemasters.
The group’s next single is “Calling After Me,” which Preston describes as “really light on its feet,” and a good lead-in to what they hope the album evokes overall. It’s out March 21.
“So far, it’s the lightest and most playful song we’ve had yet lyrically,” says Minnette. “It’s an ‘I like you, you like me’ love song. And we haven’t really had a song like that. I feel like a lot of our songs’ lyrical content is shrouded in uncertainty and insecurities. This is more assured and it’s fun.”
“Production-wise, we’re not stuffing a bunch of layers to hide behind,” adds Preston. “It is what it is. And I think for that reason, sonically it sounds so huge because there’s space for these instruments to really shine. Nothing is hiding in that song.”
Why the name Model? Each member will give you a different explanation, and it’s really open to interpretation. (It’s a lyric in one of their songs.) (Minnette also knows people may immediately think of his girlfriend’s profession.)
“There are numerous definitions that come to mind when you hear the word Model: a person model, or a model home, or you’re trying to be a model citizen,” starts Preston. “And I feel like that aligns well with what it feels like to be on the internet nowadays where there’s so much pressure to be a certain way.”
“Though that may not be such a relevant theme on the record, I do think that it’s cool that we are sort of presenting this imperfect, kind of raw, simple, real Wallows record with that undertone to it,” he adds. “That’s my unrefined take.”
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