When the Chicks canceled their Nashville show in July 2023, their opening act had to scramble. Wild Rivers, the Toronto trio blending country songwriting, Laurel Canyon folk harmonies, and indie rock guitars, had friends and family in town. “We wanted to do something special for them since they had traveled to be there,” says Andrew Oliver, one of two guitarists and three vocalists in the group. “So we found this little dive bar to put on our own show.”
Instead of the Bridgestone Arena in downtown Nashville, Wild Rivers played the Electric Jane, which holds about 300 people. It was an opportunity to put on a very different kind of show and try out some new songs, including a frayed-heart anthem called “What Kind of Song.” “If it wasn’t the first time we played it,” says Oliver, “it felt like the first time. It was such an electric feeling playing this rock song in this sweaty club during a show we put together at the last minute. When we recorded it a few months later, we were specifically trying to recapture that feeling.”
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With its reckless chorus and invitations to “wreck my life,” “What Kind of Song” anchors the trio’s second album of 2024, Better Now, and you can certainly hear how it might shake the rafters of the Electric Jane or how it might get thousands of folks singing along in an arena. Penned by Wild Rivers’ Khalid Yassein and friend-of-the-band Robin Kester, it bristles with unsettled emotions, with exciting and overwhelming possibilities, all of which are married to rousing melodies and distressed harmonies. Like so many of Wild Rivers’ songs, it lives on the knife’s edge of heartache, when an invasive memory, a stray remark, or anything might cut open an old hurt.
Wild Rivers (Credit: Hannah Gray Hall)
After first harmonizing together a decade ago as university students, the trio have been touring hard, refining their approach to songwriting and live shows. Following the release of their breakthrough 2022 album Sidelines—which won them a Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist—they split up… well, geographically speaking. Yassein moved south to Nashville, Devon Glover headed west to Los Angeles, and Oliver stayed in Toronto. They wrote as much with other people as they did with their bandmates (they describe themselves as “swingers”), and often saw each other only on tour. Distance both complicated and strengthened their bonds as a band, which became evident during the sessions for their Sidelines follow-up.
Both Better Now and its predecessor, June’s Never Better, were recorded during the same sessions late last year, when the band decamped to a secluded ranch in California. “In the past, we’ve had long, drawn-out recording processes, which were interrupted by COVID or just touring a lot,” says purple-haired Glover. “This time we wanted to capture a moment and do things very quickly, without overthinking things.” That approach paid off, as they soon realized they had enough material for two albums—not one double album split into two, but a pair of distinctive records that complemented each other completed each other’s stories but conveyed different gradients of emotion.
“Never Better is us painting with primary colors,” says Yassein. “You hear the song and you know exactly what it is. And then there’s Better Now, which uses a lot of secondary colors. We’re digging a little deeper into those bittersweet moments.” Together, they tell a story of romantic second-guessing that culminates with “Still the One,” which at first sounds like a clear-eyed pledge of devotion but quickly complicates things. It’s not a happy ending, but the cycle of affection and alienation starts all over. “That’s our lightest-sounding song but also one of our most heartbreaking ones,” says Yassein. “We were trying to be very self-aware of the whiplash feelings that we’re exploring on the album. It’s like when something happens and you have a visceral first reaction, but as time goes on, you develop very complicated feelings about it.”
Even as they play these songs nightly, Wild Rivers are still figuring them out and developing their own increasingly complicated feelings, which they hope comes through in their live shows. Whatever venue they’re playing, they’re bringing dive-bar energy to the stage. “Seeing people in the crowd singing along with so much emotion is crazy,” says Glover. “We’ve toured so much and have felt more confident as a live band and have learned how to get people excited. But when you see people in the crowd singing along with such emotion, that’s when it becomes less about you and where you were when you wrote a song. That’s when it’s all about the people’s reactions.”
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