“I had a bit of crush on her at the time,” guitarist Ben Guterl states of his first interaction with singer Eva Trilling. “I was like ‘hey, check out my demo – you should write some lyrics on it!” he laughs. “And she was like, ‘Yeah, sure!’” Instantly sparking a creative chemistry, the past three years have seen Forth Wanderers hone a potent fusion of groove-a-long melodies and fiercely felt sentiment.
“It’s like you’re going out to a pretty fun party to dance around and feel good,” Ben delicately describes of the band’s music. “But deep down inside you’re just like, ‘I miss her’.” Lingering emotion and deeply rooted hooks are two areas where this five-piece excel. Having played together in varying forms for a number of years, the group have fine-tuned their artistry through long founded friendship.
“Duke, Zach, Noah, and I used to have a band called Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire,” the guitarist recalls. “It was a weird band,” he chuckles. “Before that, Duke, Noah, and Zach were all in a band called The Pokémen – and I highly recommend you look up their Bandcamp because it’s just the funniest fucking thing. I stand by The Pokémen, very wholeheartedly.”
From the twanging bass of ‘Funky Guy’ to slacker anthem ‘Don’t You Get Suped Yet’, listening to the musicians’ earlier output it’s easy to see where Forth Wanderers get their sense of humour. It’s something that radiates as effortlessly as their charm through the music video to eponymous EP track ‘Slop’.
“I don’t really know what we expected with this,” Ben mulls of the release. “We recorded it a long time ago – way too long ago for it to be coming out like this,” he laughs. Having started recording the EP nearly a year previous the group are admittedly “pretty tired of the songs”, but they remain optimistic as to how well they’re currently succeeding.
“I think it’d be pretty fun for us to have some serious haters,” Ben declares. “I feel like that’s almost a defining moment in a band’s career, when people care enough to openly speak out against the music you’re creating. That’s a strong emotion we haven’t made people feel yet,” he states. “Other than that,” he quickly adds, “I hope as many people hear it as possible and like it and want to hear more.”
Striving towards pastures new, the group are thrilled at the reaction their music has been gaining. “It’s nice that people are receiving them so warmly because it’s kind of like affirmation for us,” Ben enthuses. “It’s cool seeing people hearing them for the first time and really liking them. It’s reminding us that they’re not bad songs,” he grins.
Receiving seemingly unanimous praise from the press, it’s the presents the hype has led to that are really getting the band excited. “I’m getting an official Forth Wanderers jersey!” Ben exclaims, referring to the Scottish football club from who the band took their name. “That’s probably going to be the peak of my musical career,” Ben continues. “It’s all downhill from here.”
In reality, that’s far from the case. Only four tracks in length, ‘Slop’ offers an entirely fulfilling glimpse into the world the Montclair outfit share. Their debut international release, it’s a world that’s continuously expanding. “I was a little dismissive of it at first,” Ben recalls of early conversations about releasing a record outside of the US. “I was like, ‘We’re not big enough for that, no one’s gonna care.’”
Now, having “just confirmed some stuff with a Europe booking agent” (though they “don’t want to confirm anything quite yet”), that success is something they’re about to experience for real – and that’s not all the band have got up their sleeves. “We just finished tracking a ten song LP,” Ben reveals. “We recorded most of it, all the instrumentals, over summer. Ava just finished tracking yesterday, I think.” Planning to “sit on it for a while, do the release right, and make it a banger,” Forth Wanderers are riding the wave towards success and savouring every moment.
Taken from the November issue of Dork, out now.