Yoni Wolf’s Personal Best

“I could come up with five favourite songs from a bunch of different bands,” he explains. “But when it’s your own music… it kind of harkens back to specific periods in your life, and you’ve sang those songs on tour for years. It’s just not clean, you know? It's like I'm coming in with all this residue.”

Wolf may enter our conversation slightly hesitant, but his band’s new album - The Well I Fell Into - is similarly full of reflective sentiments. The eighth studio LP from the beloved alt-rap project turned genre-blurring indie-rock outfit, it’s a record that sees frontman and creative leader Wolf ruminating on past love, loss of self, the uncertainty of the future and - at times - his own artistic legacy.

“Is this all I am now, your old best pal’s high school pet sounds?”, he wonders on the album’s third track, “Brand New”, adding a few lines later: “Just tell me what the work is, or have I outlived my purpose?”

Elsewhere on “Marigold”, he sings of that detached feeling that often comes as you grow older, “I’ve barely been in my body since Obama… I’m just riding on this bus ‘til I’m gone”.

Wolf recently described each WHY? record as a time for him to “really take stock” on where he is and how he’s feeling - “an opportunity for me to button up a period of my life”. When we meet, Yoni says that The Well I Fell Into ultimately documents the demise of a recent relationship - “A process of coming to terms with this mourning”, he tells me. “And coming to terms with the end of this relationship”.

WHY’s back-catalogue has never been short on break-up songs, but Wolf makes it a point of emphasis this time that the album shouldn’t be seen as some sort of "bitter kiss-off”. Indeed, there’s less score-settling or some of the wry punchlines of his earlier work.

Often the focus is instead placed on his own faults and failings, like on the gentle and shimmering “Later at The Loon”, which documents self-sabotage, or on lead single “The Letters, Etc.”, which sees Wolf concluding: “I acted like a fool… I guess it’s my own damn fault.”

Amongst all the self-reflection though, we also see glimmers of hope on the record, or at least acceptance. “There are moments of feeling everything's gonna be okay and this is how life goes,” Wolf explains. “And then there are other moments of feeling despair about it. I think it vacillates. It’s a broad emotional palette.”

Following on from 2019’s opaque but intriguing AOKOHIO, an experimental collection of 19 ultra-short songs that played out like aural vignettes, this latest LP feels like the most complete and focused WHY? record for a while. Its rich, expansive and layered sound expands the foundations laid on 2017's Moh Lhean, while Wolf delivers some of his most emotive and diaristic lyricism since 2009’s underrated Eskimo Snow.

“I think I wrote some songs that feel true to me,” Wolf says of the album as a whole. “It’s been really hard in the past 15 years - physically and with illness. I had this idea of a certain career trajectory that I thought my music would continue to take and the rug was pulled out from under me at some point. And now I'm finding ways to make it work with my new reality. I feel like I've finally come to [terms with that] and I feel like this album reflects that.”

A few days before our chat, Wolf put a call out to fans on social media to help him whittle down his Personal Best - five songs that sum up his career to date. “I found it incredibly difficult, actually,” he admits. “And the crowdsourcing did not help at all, because that's just their opinions. So I just had to go through my catalogue and choose different periods throughout.”

Wolf pauses for a second before adding: “And maybe I’ll have reasons for why I picked each song…”