EP Corner: Wilds EP

Wilds are a band from Seattle who cite Mclusky and Built to Spill among their influences. Their debut EP - simply titled EP - came out back in October, and at just over 9 minutes in length, it's a bite-sized chunk of thick, fuzzy indie rock with a pleasantly noisy centre.

The first track, Endings, sounds a bit like Death Cab for Cutie, but it's less clean, less neat than any Death Cab track I've heard, and the stuttering snare drum blast that kicks in about two-thirds of the way through is probably too harsh to sit comfortably on the likes of Plans or Codes and Keys. It's the sort of song that Ben Gibbard might write after driving through a Mad Max-style wasteland for a day or two with Single Mothers on the car stereo.

Next up is That Pit in My Stomach, which bursts out of your headphones as you bite into the EP's liquid centre. This is a jerky, spasmodic song (the most Mcluskyish moment here, I think) that features squawky, exhilarating screams in place of the tamer Gibbardesque vocals on tracks 1 and 3. It's an important moment on this, Wilds' inaugural release, because it shows that they can operate at more than one speed - in fact, it shows that they can operate with the brakes cut and the car hurtling out of control entirely:

The third and final track is called Red Red Refuge, and it's kind of like a mirrored reprise of Endings: instead of starting steadily and erupting into chaos as it nears the finish line, this song opens with a squall of distortion and stoppy-starty drumming before settling into a more consistent groove. It lends a nice feeling of symmetry to the EP, which overall is a confident-sounding and tantalisingly brief introduction to Wilds and what they have to offer.

The Wilds EP is available to buy from the group's Bandcamp page. $2 from every purchase will go to The Ocean Cleanup, an organisation that "designs and develops advanced technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic".