Mazes

Mazes formed in Manchester during 2009, uniting four musicians whose shared taste for classic pop and sweet, Midwestern-tinged indie rock shaped their sound from the start. Jarin Tabata, a guitarist who had relocated from the United States, joined forces with New Zealand-born drummer Neil Robinson, while two U.K. natives—guitarist Conan Roberts, who ran the D.I.Y. label Italian Beach Babes Records, and vocalist/guitarist Jack Cooper, founder of the comparable Suffering Jukebox Records—completed the lineup. Once the group had coalesced, all four relocated to London, where they issued a string of 7" singles and self-made cassettes ahead of their first proper album, A Thousand Heys, which appeared on Fat Cat Records in 2011.

The band’s follow-up for the same label marked a striking evolution, as Mazes began to define a distinctive identity by folding traces of Krautrock into their idiosyncratic guitar-pop approach on 2013’s Ores & Minerals. Whereas that record had been self-produced and assembled from disparate performances, the next effort was captured live with minimal overdubs amid the 2014 snowstorms in upstate New York, under the guidance of Parquet Courts’ engineer Jonathan Schenke. Early autumn 2014 saw the release of Wooden Aquarium, confirming that the quartet had fulfilled the potential hinted at across their initial pair of albums.