WURLEY: WESLEYAN’S FUNKY INDIE-ROCK SOUNDSCAPE

From their first show in the graffitied basement of the infamous WestCo dormitory, Wurley has emerged as a stand-out indie-rock band on the Wesleyan University campus, expanding their horizons to the greater Middletown, Connecticut community and beyond. Wurley has quickly distinguished themselves within the vibrant and eclectic Wesleyan music scene, known for producing artists such as MGMT, LCD Soundsystem, and Dev Hynes (Blood Orange). The five member band – composed of guitarist/songwriters Ezra Key-Cohen and Finn Guillemin, Ollivier Hart-Vilain on the drums, lead singer Graham Johnson, and Nora Loftus on the bass–has quickly gained momentum, growing from sporadic dorm jam sessions into the opening set for Richard Lloyd of Television. Recently, the band ventured to New York City where they recorded their self-titled debut album, featuring a tight 19 minutes of classic Wurley songs, the first they ever played together.  

In an unreserved study room at the Olin Library on campus amidst  FRONTRUNNER caught up with the band ahead of their first LP release. 

Okay, so to start off, tell me how you guys formed exactly? 

Ezra: “Day 3 me and Finn meet, and he sees that I have a guitar in my room, and we both have the same brand of guitar… and then we were playing music that we wrote for each other and we were like, oh we should start a band. And then we set out on this sort of quest to find people.”

Nora: “Well I was in Finn’s spanish class, and I was like, ‘yo juego bajó,’ and he was like ‘Oh yo juego guitaro,’

[laughs]

“I don’t know Spanish very well.”

Finn: “It took like 8 classes to get her.” 

Nora: “Yeah, I took a lot of convincing.”

So, when did it become more than just fucking around? 

Norah: “For me it was the first show for sure, because I think even though in retrospect we did not play that well…” 

Graham: “We played well.”

Norah: “But it was good for where we were at, it was just so fun.” 

Finn: “I think I knew from our first jam session. I was like, damn, this guy playing guitar is, like, the best songwriter I’ve ever played with, and then I was like, this guy singing is the best singer I’ve ever played with, and there’s like no reason to not lock this down immediately. I saw the potential.”

How would you personally describe your sound? 

Graham: “I feel like when we were in the studio listening back to our songs it was more than just indie rock.”

Ezra: “The first song that we ever did together was a song that I wrote in like the first two weeks here, and like, when I brought it in it sounded totally different than it does today because when Graham sings it, it just sound different, like his voice and the way he sings things, it changes the genre.” 

Graham: “Songs come in a certain way yeah, but they change so much based on how all of us play.”

Olivier: “I don’t think you can pin us down, I think we’re just artists.”

[laughter]

Ezra: “Alright.”

Nora: “Don’t say that.” 

Ollivier: “Put in parentheses ‘sarcastic.’”

Can you talk a little bit about your songwriting process?  

Ezra: “So much stuff gets rejected, probably like a 1 in 10 hit rate we have.” 

Nora: “You guys crank it out.”

Ezra: “We do, we write a lot, on our own we’re probably writing a few songs every week.” 

[laughter]

Graham: “Fin? I don’t know.” 

Finn: “Hey, I wrote 12 this winter break. “

Finn: “When we’re writing, I’m not really writing Nora’s part, I’m not writing Olivier’s part at all, I’m not writing how Graham’s gonna sing, I’m not writing Ezra’s part.”

Nora: “It’s very much a skeleton.”

Ezra: “Yeah we are writing like a shell that can be filled in.” 

Finn: “Everyone gets to put their own input on it which really works.” 

Nor: “It’s so fun.”

So, why the name Wurley? I tried to look it up in Urban Dictionary and some pretty scary stuff came up.

Collectively: “What?!”

Nora: “We just saw it written on a dry erase board.”

Ezra: “And we took it, it was the only name we could all agree upon.”

I saw you guys traveled and did a show at Bowdoin last semester, what was it like to perform at another college campus?

Nora: “I felt like we were proving ourselves to people who had no idea who we were, and they ended up dancing. It felt very validating.”

Ezra: “The best thing ever was when we were playing, it was a song that i usually get pretty interactive with, and I was like, I have no idea if these people are going to get into this, and I was over by this big crowd of dudes, and they were getting so into it. It was like the frattiest dudes I’ve ever seen, they were kind of slow to get into it but, it was so cute. I don’t know, it was proof that it’s not just our friends going to see us”. 

Graham: “We were throwing beers into the crowd…”

Ezra: “non-alcoholic beers!” 

Finn: “We thought no one was going to show up, we were going up to people in the dining hall before, and no one gave a shit, and we were like, wow we just came all this way for nobody to show up, and it started out small and then people were like telling their friends to come when they heard our first song. It was really cool.”

Graham: “It was packed, fully at capacity.”

Okay, last question, tell me about recording your first LP last weekend, what should people expect from this album drop?

Ezra: “When we were recording, the guy who was recording us, he was like, this is a snapshot of who you are right now, and I kind of like that. Like, a lot of our songs were written a year ago, and they’re different, we’re different, but it’s still great.” 

Graham: “It could not have been more fun.”

Finn: “There’s something about arguing and then making up over something you really care about that makes you grow a lot closer.”

Nora: “We got so grumpy.”

Ezra: “I think that, if we are going to talk about the album we have to talk about our first song Purple, I think the nice thing is that since it’s the first song that we did together and it was written in the first few weeks of college, it’s special. It’s a song about disorientation, like I just don’t know what I’m really doing here. It’s a song about how I don’t really know these people around me, I feel no attachment to these people, how do I navigate being at this place where nobody cares about me and I don’t care about them yet. I think it’s kind of beautiful, the song is about how do I get attachments in this place, and probably the first big attachment I had here was Wurley…”

[aww]

 “…There’s a lyric that’s like “I left the party early just to play guitar” because I wrote the song after leaving a party that I hated I was just like…”

It’s like a humiliation ritual

Ezra: “Yeah, it was humiliating, I was like what do I do here, and I think it’s kind of beautiful that Wurley became a thing right after that.”