Springwild sounds like a ghost town for the romantically damaged, a psychic dive bar where the weird kids who didn’t grow up right hang around, wondering where they are supposed to be and where they’ll end up. 

The band started in the velvet labyrinth of the late great Paris on Ponce. A persistent, prophetic roof leak made rehearsal on rainy days mandatory, and before the two dozen or so drip catching buckets overflowed, band members Colin Arnstein (Machete, Untied States), Joe Binns (Elf Power, The Danny Family, Allgood) and David Hurtado (Back to Memphis, Pagan Handbell Choir) would learn to hum the same frequencies... that is until evicted by the Atlanta condo gold rush. 

The three create spectral, off-kilter melodies and arrangements that meander like loose threads on a tattered coat, unraveling in slow motion. The subject matter behind the band’s impenetrable titles ranges from brain chemistry to polyamorous herds of diseased animals. 

They don’t stay on one sound for long. In live shows they’ll shapeshift between old phantoms (Animals, Kinks, Beck, Everly Brothers) and the cracked teeth of their first three releases, Tangled, Lose the Language and Accident of it All. Their discographic past slow walks back and forth from 90s scuzz-angst to baroque indie rock.  

They’re working on their 4th release now, and wherever they end up, expect a sonic landscape well littered with disorienting nostalgia, sometimes oddly saccharine, sometimes morbidly so.

Springwild is following