Wishy

You could call Wishy’s story a lucky one. For years, Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites’ musical paths crossed then diverged, until they finally came together to form a new band. For a couple more years that band morphed, changing names and styles, but once everything cohered, it was clear Krauter and Pitchkites’ musical synergy was a rare one–the kind that sounds like someone hitting the jackpot. Part sly wink and part warm gratitude, it’s only fitting their much anticipated full length debut is titled Triple Seven.

Krauter and Pitchkites first met in high school in Indianapolis, but didn’t connect as friends until a little later, when Pitchkites was in college. At the time, Pitchkites was making music and playing shows around Indiana as Push Pop; Krauter, also gigging around Indiana, became an instant fan. After a brief stint in Philadelphia, Pitchkites found herself back home in Indianapolis in the spring of 2021. Krauter, who had since garnered acclaim for his solo albums, was eager to start a new band. He approached Pitchkites with material he’d written during the pandemic, and suggested they work together.

By day Krauter works as a music teacher, giving drum and guitar lessons to students, while Pitchkites is a seamstress by trade and often makes embroidered merch for the band. Coming up in a scene defined by hardcore and emo, Krauter and Pitchkites instead found themselves writing melodies in their heads while driving to work, pulling music from the air and arriving at a blearier, more ethereal interpretation of Midwest expanse. Initially, their music oscillated between hazy dream-pop and heavier alt-rock.

“It felt like, well, nobody’s doing this right now around here, so let’s do it,” Krauter recalls.

“What it ultimately comes down to is we make music we want to listen to. It’s just being in your bedroom and scheming,” says Pitchkites.

Wishy’s early days were fruitful, with Krauter and Pitchkites coming armed with songs destined for their debut all the way back in 2021. Eventually, they had a fateful session in Los Angeles in late 2022 with Ben Lumsdaine, who ended up engineering, mixing, and co-producing Triple Seven. Pitchkites had recently collaborated with her friend Steve Marino, of Angel Du$t, on a song called “Triple Seven.” Sounding like a long-lost ‘90s pop-rock track refracted through watercolor memory, the song became the metric for the LA sessions, and the true genesis of the album that would share its name.

The number 777 isn’t just a slot machine jackpot. “It’s an angel number that symbolizes spiritual awakening and knowing one’s self,” Pitchkites explains. Krauter and Pitchkites might’ve indeed felt some good fortune in finding their way back to each other, but more so these songs became a vehicle for them both to discover more about who they were as people and artists.

Eventually they decided: Why can’t we combine everything we want to hear? After prior monikers and iterations, Wishy was born as a kaleidoscope of alternative music’s semi-recent history, with traces of shoegaze, grunge, and power-pop swirling together. From the revelations of the LA session and “Triple Seven,” Krauter and Pitchkites felt a runaway traction. The music kept flowing, with the final sessions for Triple Seven completed in the waning days of 2023 back home in Indiana.

Over time, Krauter’s interest had skewed towards wanting Wishy to be louder, more aggressive, more fun. Eventually, a full band lineup cohered with the additions of guitarist Dimitri Morris, bassist Mitch Collins and drummer Conner Host. On Triple Seven, the group achieves both a synthesis and a tension, foreshadowed by opener “Sick Sweet.” That song rushes out the gates with a nimble alt-rock glide, its title outlining the binaries Pitchkites and Krauter manipulate across the ensuing nine tracks. Sometimes Wishy is all swoon and mist, as on gorgeous Pitchkites-led tracks like “Little While” and “Just Like Sunday.” Other times, Pitchkites and Krauter merge their voices, as on the jangly cascade of “Persuasion” or the scuzzy, feral closer “Spit.” In “Love On The Outside,” Wishy’s penchant for indelible hooks is couched equally in pillowy atmospherics and scathing distortion, becoming a wave over which Krauter wrestles with all the excitement and impatience and frustration that comes with the confusing but ultimately joyful nascent stages of a budding relationship.

Similarly, many of Triple Seven’s songs operate at the polarities of lovelorn and lovestruck, or the murky waters in between. “A lot of the music we connect on is that classic melancholy, bittersweet, yearning, daydream kind of thing,” Krauter says. He and Pitchkites never had to discuss themes or lyrics together. Their writing inherently met in this space, both of them making sense of relationships, schisms, and longing — whether in songs that were spacious enough to wonder what could’ve been, or in others fiery enough to burn it all away. “Turns out it’s rich subject matter,” Krauter quips.

It was, in fact, such a rich vein that Pitchkites and Krauter recorded a total of 21 songs, with five of them appearing on their 2023 EP Paradise. From there, they culled down the material that made the most sense together, a loose web of vignettes and snapshots capturing them in a whirlwind couple of years — exiting the pandemic, embarking on an embryonic project, making sense of their musical pasts while forging a musical future alongside one another, each of them on a journey of self-acceptance and self-understanding via these new songs. From the intimate beginnings of two old friends trading bedroom demos, Triple Seven bloomed to a bold, ambitious introduction with the scope and heft of the bygone big-budget rock albums that inspired it. Sometimes gorgeous, sometimes festering, and always cathartic, Triple Seven became a vibrant and exhilarating document not only of messiness and change, but of new beginnings and self-discovery.