I’m huddled over a table in an old school Soho boozer, with half drunk Guinness’ and baccy dust littering the table, scrummaging for a headline from a band far too savvy to bestow it. The act in question, Wunderhorse, have “no idea” if they are leading the charge of a British guitar music renaissance, a query I’ve dangled in front of them. Given their humility, I guess it’s down to me to make such an argument.

Over the past decade or two, there has been a systemic shift in the industry and wider society that makes it near impossible for a band to capture the imagination of listeners that they may have, without pretence, in earlier eras. Jacob Slater, UK four-piece Wunderhose’s frontman – witty, chiselled, moral – breaks down the change in no uncertain terms. “With bands like the Libertines and the Strokes, there was something about what they were doing that seemed attractive because it was outlaw-ish,” he begins, the band murmuring in agreement. “Which is something that young people have always been drawn to, whether they are holding a guitar or riding a horse like a cowboy. It’s that spirit of living on the fringe. But nowadays it’s hard to retain that sense of mystery because of stuff like social media. It’s like – ‘here we are behind the scenes, here’s this person eating their fucking dinner’. You don’t want that. If you’re a kid and you hear a song that takes your breath away and your mind to beautiful things, you don’t want to be told that that person is just like you. You want to believe that there’s something else out there, something beyond your fucking suburban town. That’s what captured my attention when I was younger, and there isn’t really that much of that anymore.”

Slater’s words, for me, bring a certain degree of irony, as it was his own music that captivated me in the manner he describes, a rare anomaly in my listening norm given the over-saturation and lack of earnestness in much of this TikTokian era of consumption. But when I first heard “Teal”, the 2021 debut single from Wunderhorse which was at that point the solo moniker of Slater, emotion gushed all over me, drowning me in sentiment. It was a symbolic moment, a sonic vehicle of inner sanctimony, and a cry for clarity within my own personal whirlwind of feeling.

“I don’t think there was much thought behind why [“Teal” was the debut release]. We just thought it was a strong song and wanted to get it out,” the song’s writer shrugs casually, rationalising the impact of the track. His band, though, clearly feel the unique and boundless effervescence of the cut, not unlike myself. “It just had that more visceral energy,” bassist Pete Woodin offers. “Nothing needed to be overcomplicated on that song,” Jamie Staples, the drummer, adds. “I remember the first time I heard Jacob play it, I won’t forget that.”

The bond between the four twenty-somethings is light-hearted, focused, and without ego. The seasoned musicians have known and played with each other to differing degrees for years, with inter-collaborative relationships carved out pre-Wunderhorse’s inception. To call them an ‘indie’ band – as they are regularly coined – is unjust, and guitarist Harry Tristan Fowler doesn’t like it much. “I always get weird about indie,” he winces. “I don’t feel like an indie band and I don’t know what one is anymore.” Wunderhorse isn’t a concept to box in, after all. There’s a timelessness and fluidity to their sound and methodology that is rare to uncover. The aforementioned “Teal” for instance, could be plucked from a myriad of decades, with its raw 70s edge down to its anthemic late 90s-tinged climax. “We all listen to stuff from different times, reaching into the past,” Slater shares. “I think that’s what naturally comes out when we write.”

The band’s apexian figure has been on a topsy-turvy musical journey of his own to get to this point. Slater first announced himself to the industry as the singer of Dead Pretties, the punk rock trio who became notorious for their raucous live shows and anarchic presence. “I definitely learnt a lot about what not to do,” he reflects on his time with the Pretties. “Having said that, we did have a very good work ethic; when we were trying to get signed we were playing multiple nights a week every week, sacrificing everything to do it. That was carried forward; I didn’t go into the industry knowing anyone or having any sort of leg up, it was just getting out there and doing the hard yards.”

Although undoubtedly a hotly-tipped rising act within the constraints of a postured punk scene, after a period of murky occurrences Slater emerged from his former band, feeling it wasn’t an “appropriate vehicle to reflect the breadth of my influences,” he pinpoints. “It was too narrow an avenue of expression for all the stuff I wanted to do. And also it had become a lot about the other stuff, and less to do with the music, which was just getting in the way of creative impulse.” For Slater, Wunderhorse is what rose from the ashes of Pretties; a solo endeavour, backed for gigs and recording by three session musicians who had their own ventures outside of the project.

After a smattering of singles across ’21 and the first half of the following year, Slater shared his debut album, Cub, in October of 2022 — a raw, rousing and stylistically sprawling opening body of work. Although the album was hotly-anticipated by many, there wasn’t an overt expectation attached to the project, absent somewhat from the “toxic blight on a generation” social media and its wheel of discovery. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he says. “There were plenty of… [trails away in thought] put it this way — nobody was telling me it was going to do well. Not in a negative way, it was more about managing expectations.”

Rather than get too involved with online rigamarole, the record instead relied on word of mouth and a community of musicians to bolster its popularity. “A lot of its success actually came from other musicians picking up on the songs and asking if we wanted to come on tour. That exposed us to much bigger crowds and different demographics. The industry had very little to do with it, with the exception of radio where we had some good plugins. So a lot came from our peers, which is good, it felt right. It restored some faith in what we were doing and that it had merit, because these are people who we respect for what they are doing as well.”

Such musicians who picked up on Wunderhorse’s boundless potential include Irish troubadours Fontaines D.C. and legacy crooners The Pixies, both of whom invited Slater and co to open for them on their respective tours. Promptly graduating from dingy pubs to iconic venues brimming with spectators there broadly to see the following act, these elongated periods of touring were a learning curve and a much needed baptism of fire for the band. “When we first started out on the Fontaines tour we were playing in tiny rooms ourselves at our own gigs,” Woodin says. “Then suddenly we were playing on stage in front of thousands of people who have no idea who you are. We were like — ‘right, let’s put fucking everything into this’. And that’s been the ethos that we’ve had ever since.”

During this period, with the joy and strain of tour life, the four boys grew tighter, and Wunderhorse transitioned from a solo moniker into a four piece act. “I like feeling like I’m part of something that’s bigger than me,” Slater explains. “The nature of us touring together, we started getting really closely knit. After Harry joined, we elevated our live show and there was this feeling that it gave us, and we took that feeling into the next process of writing a record. There’s a lot of things about Midas that wouldn’t be as good if it was left up to me. There’s a lot of intrinsic human elements to the playing of each person that make it what it is. I couldn’t have come up with that in my own head, it had to come from this group of individuals.”

Wunderhorse’s ‘sophomore’ album, Midas, is set for release on 30th August, of which at the time of writing a trio of teasers have arrived – “July”, “Silver”, and the title track. In many ways the record feels like a debut, given the circumstances around the strengthening of the band’s agenda. Unlike Cub, they approached the album’s writing collectively, and devised it quickly, within a month or so. They sought after an upper echelon producer in Craig Silvey (a Grammy-winner for his work with Arcade Fire) to meet a self-formed deadline designed to push them in their artistic and aspirational capabilities. “I just lied to everyone who was funding it and said that I’d written the record,” Slater jokes on the swift turnaround. “Luckily, the alchemy of the whole thing made some good brew.”

What boiled from the short sharp burst of writing and recording is a mortar of magnificence. Midas is a potent listen; sometimes fierce and angry, other times poignant and delicate, it showcases a fully-fledged, multi-dimensional artistry, never outstaying its welcome, even with tracks like the closer clocking in at nearly nine minutes. Midas moulds the grandly-scoped cinema of early 70s Rolling Stones and the broad but barring songwriting of Bob Dylan with the raw, rousing ambience of Nirvana and The Pixies and instinctive existentialism of PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke. It’s a homage to the past but never derivative, with a crisp vitality to the production. It is amongst the British guitar records of the year, and a rallying cry to an industry that has in large lost faith in four white lads holding instruments. After all, Wunderhorse are “a kicking and scratching band,” Slater self-defines. “Some bands – they might be great bands or they might be shit bands – get big really quick. We’ve been doing this a while, way before anyone even knew who we were. And it’s always been that thing of – we’re going to get over here. If we’ve got to go the long way to do that, that’s fine with us. It makes us who we are, you know?”

With Midas’ late August release set to up the ante tenfold, the band will play some of the biggest shows of their career before 2024 is done. A run of summer festivals, including a favourable Reading & Leeds spot, will be ensued by an October headline UK tour (an O2 Academy Brixton extravaganza nestled amidst) and then a stint of shows once again supporting their friends in Fontaines D.C.. Then? “Fuck knows. If there’s songs, we’ll write a record.” And if there isn’t – if the white noise becomes too much for a band built on their love for the sound and a lack of entertainment at the notion of fame – there’s always surfing, for Slater at least.

“Just before Covid I moved down to Cornwall because I’ve always wanted to live there, and I was in-between projects – Wunderhorse hadn’t really got going yet,” Slater says. “I lost a lot of faith – not in music, but in the world that surrounded music, the industry. I felt like I needed to get my head together a little bit and I had mates down there. It was just a door opening into another world that had nothing to do with music. It showed me how much bigger life is than music. It’s very easy to be consumed by music, and that’s a beautiful thing – until it’s not, then it can be quite limiting. And you need things to feed the creative machine, and if you stay in the same place for too long, it starts to eat itself. [Surfing] just feels great. Once you persevere it and get past a certain point with it, that feeling it gives you is indescribable. It’s almost a threat to my musical career, sometimes I’m like, ‘fuck it, I’m just going to go and surf and never come back.’ It’s dangerous.”

Midas will be released via Communion Records on 30th August. Pre-order here.