After a multi-year hiatus, the indie pop maestros, Wild Party, are set to release a new full-length album in 2023. After releasing their debut record, Phantom Pop, in October of 2014, the band toured extensively during the following year and a half before finally calling it quits at the end of 2015.
“We played probably 100 shows in 2014 and 2015… but there weren’t a lot of people at the shows who knew the music, and we weren’t making a lot of money…things just weren’t working out,” frontman Lincoln Kreifels recalls. Family and financial obligations meant taking the focus away from music for a while.
While Phantom Pop’s infectious melodies and danceable grooves never found a home with a larger market in 2015, the band’s nearly decade-old release has recently found a new, devoted fan base online. “The Spotify algorithm seemed to suggest us to a lot of new fans who were listening to bands that sounded similar to us, and things really began to take off around 2018.” To date, the band has hundreds of millions of streams and a half a million monthly listeners on Spotify alone.
A newly found fan-base reinvigorated Kreifels and long-time collaborator Lucas Hughes, and they began demoing songs again in 2018. However, it wasn’t until a close call gave Kreifels what he describes as a re-awakening: “I got really sick about 9 about months ago, and it was almost a miraculous healing… I went from almost dying––my liver almost failed… but I came out of that floating almost, really thankful to be given another chance… music is something I need to pursue.”
Together with band member and producer, Ethan Kaufmann, Wild Party has been steadily dropping singles since 2021, culminating into the band’s 2023 EP release, Get Up. The yet-to-be-named full length EP (expected at the end of 2023) will continue to feature the band’s signature indie-pop sound, albeit with more creative ambition. “It’s pretty similar (but) it’s a little more experimental in a lot of ways… there are going to be some songs that aren’t structured so pop-centric.”
When asked about touring, Kreifels expresses enthusiasm, “The plan is play shows consistently… (and) make as many real connections with people as possible… (we want to) try and make the world a better place with our music.”
