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Studio Milwaukee Session: Wishy

Jen Ellis

Do you think bands care about genre as much as some music fans do? Like, at the first practice, do they all stand around talking about how they’re going to be the greatest folktronica group of all time?

Wishy are not a folktronica group. But they did have me thinking about genre this week in preparation for their Studio Milwaukee Session ahead of Friday night’s show at X-Ray Arcade.

I’ve listened to their excellent debut album, Triple Seven, umpteen-something times since it dropped in August but only discovered in the last few days that most people connect it to shoegaze. As 88Nine music director Erin Wolf knowledgeably and patiently described to me before the session, a more accurate description of the album might be half shoegaze and half dream pop.

Even more accurately, as Wishy themselves have stated, the band makes “loud pop.” Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter, who formed Wishy just a couple years ago after first meeting in high school, expounded on that during Wolf’s mid-session interview.

“We both write in a different style a little bit,” Krauter began. “I tend to write more of the heavier, louder stuff. Nina tends to write more of the sweeter, poppier stuff. But what it comes down to I think is that we both just share a love of sort of indulgent, kind of twee, melody-forward, fun, feel-good stuff.”

“I think that’s why our music aligns more with power pop,” Pitchkites added. “Because power pop as a genre is literally just heavy pop. I feel like we strongly align with that.”

After a brief pause, Krauter put the appropriate button on the whole topic of genre: “But call us whatever you want,” he said with a chuckle. “It really doesn’t matter.”

In the end, it’s how the music hits you. For their session, Wishy opted for a rope-a-dope approach, starting out with three relatively gentile (albeit emphatically loud) selections: “Little While” and the title track from Triple Seven sandwiched around “Happy Days” from the Mana EP. With the audience properly set up, they delivered a knockout rendition of “Too True” from the Paradise EP, although that one was just for the Radio Milwaukee members in the room.

The rest of the set and Wolf’s interview — which took a delightful turn into embroidery — are ready for your listening enjoyment via the player at the top of the page. And if you want to get in on all the cool moments that happen at our sessions, jump over to our membership page and see how to reserve a seat at these incredible performances.

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Studio MKE: Wishy set list

  1. “Little While”
  2. “Happy Days”
  3. “Triple Seven”
  4. “Too True” (non-broadcast performance)

Director of Digital Content | Radio Milwaukee