Winged Wheel - Desert So Green

“So, how did this band even happen?” That’s the question most often asked of Winged Wheel, a creatively and geographically scattered collective who have somehow congregated to make a noise that’s unexpected but undeniable. The band includes Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Circuit des Yeux), Cory Plump (Spray Paint, co-owner of the dream venue Tubby’s), Matthew J. Rolin (solo guitar wizard and half of the Powers/Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack, and Fred Thomas (Idle Ray, Tyvek), each player living in a different city and bringing their own unique element to the group’s chain reactions. Early long distance file-trading between a few members yielded 2022’s No Island, a debut album that was accidentally really good. Good enough for the band to expand their membership and meet in person for the sessions that became 2024’s Big Hotel, a surgically-assembled murk of high energy kosmische rock with jammed-out tendencies. Fast forward just a little and all of a sudden the band that started out as a passing idea has completed multiple tours, become a taper’s dream with sets that drift through structure and improvisation, and ridden the momentum to places unforeseen on their third album, Desert So Green.

After a run of shows across the Midwest in the spring of 2025, the group settled into a studio on the outskirts of Chicago to track their next record. Though the full lineup had only been solidified for a little over a year at this point, time together on stage led to a quickly-expanding sound and a unified vision of always going somewhere new. To this end, Winged Wheel abandoned the play-now-sort-it-out-later approach of Big Hotel and instead spent hours refining flashes of inspiration into coherent songs. Full-blast, krautrock-informed jamming took a backseat to deeper experimentation, and the band found new dimensions, different atmospheres. The arrangements are still dense with layers of synths, noisy disruptions, and glowing orbs of alien sound, but every shift is considered and intentional. It’s an album that spends its duration struggling to balance a scale with excitement on one side and anxious tension on the other. Things move a little slower and the aftershock hits harder than the initial adrenaline rush.

While Desert So Green is defined by a newfound restraint, there’s also an intensity that never lets up. “Bird Spells” pulsates perpetually at the edge of a breaking point, moving through various storm systems before finally, momentarily, finding a break in the clouds. Can-esque rhythms, scrapes of viola, and Throbbing Gristle-level decay all get dubbed into infinity on the absolutely demonic “Canvas 2.” Rolling waves of percussion and treated instruments try fruitlessly to climb their way out of a slippery well on the churning closer “The Suite Goes Quiet.” At times, some ripping weirdness cuts through the simmering. Syncopated dual guitars lock in on “Speed Table” while Shelley destroys the kit as only he can, and Slack’s greasy steel guitar riffing of “I See Poseurs Every Day” evokes scenes of a truck stop showdown between ZZ Top and the Silver Apples. “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” is the closest Winged Wheel has ever come to straightforward melodic tuneage, and it still arrives in a form that’s uneasy and fragmented.

Desert So Green represents yet another transformation for Winged Wheel, one that takes them into a space of sharpened dynamism and more nuanced expression. The energy that arrived all at once in loud explosions on earlier albums is refracted here, and all the more powerful when broken down. It’s a set of strange songs that demand close inspection and reward this attention with a clearer view of the band’s individual personalities, and the separate alchemical presence that emerges when these personalities come together. Desert So Green changes gears, defies probability, confounds in strains of joy and confusion, and leaves us wondering, once again and still without answers, how did this band even happen?