Wilder Maker

Brooklyn-based indie outfit Wilder Maker builds its sound around the vivid scene-setting stories of founder and chief songwriter Gabriel Birnbaum, pairing that narrative density with densely layered instrumental work. After issuing a run of self-released EPs and codifying its storytelling approach on the 2018 album Zion, the group brought in an array of guest singers and players to help realize its characters on the 2022 release Male Models, whose tracks unfolded as discrete vignettes and featured Mutual Benefit, Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz, and additional contributors.

The band took shape in Brooklyn during the early 2010s when Birnbaum and a handful of musical associates began making home recordings; those sessions gradually produced successive lineups that performed live and issued projects on their own, including the 2013 album Year of Endless Light and the three 2015 EPs collected as Everyday Crimes Against Objects of Desire, Vols. 1-3. By then Katie Von Schleicher had become a permanent member, handling lead vocals on numerous songs along with guitar and keyboards. In 2017 the band placed its New Streets 7" with Saddle Creek, marking its widest release to date. The following year Northern Spy issued the full-length Zion, which presented Birnbaum and Von Schleicher alongside guitarist Adam Brisbin, bassist Nick Jost, and drummer Sean Mullins. On Zion, Wilder Maker broadened its palette with larger-scale arrangements that fused Americana elements and jagged indie-rock textures. That impulse toward scale reached fuller expression on the second album, Male Models, which appeared in July 2022. In addition to several tracks adorned with orchestral detail, the record found core members Birnbaum, Jost, and Mullins working with an assortment of outside vocalists and musicians that included Counting Crows' Adam Duritz, Dirty Projectors' Felicia Douglass, V.V. Lightbody, Mutual Benefit, and others.