Parellel Play and The Ever Evolving Sound of Wieuca
© Amanda Killian
Words & Photos by Amanda Killian
When I arrive at The Drunken Unicorn on Saturday night to hear Wieuca perform, the band is in a few different places at once. Frontman, Will Ingram, is strolling around the venue, chatting with people at the merch table. Bassist, Jack Webster, is up front getting ready to watch the opener. The other members, drummer Matt Daniel and Andrew Cleveland, who heads up keys and electronics, are in Decatur in pursuit of a chainsaw. I’m told the chainsaw will figure into that night’s set. It’s clear there have been similar side quests before.
Something about this little pre-show scene feels right for Wieuca, who have spent time stretched between Athens and Atlanta, and soon to be other places; Ingram tells me before getting on stage that he’ll be Brooklyn-bound in a few weeks. He’s looking sharp, wearing a Switchfoot cap—a tribute to his early days as a Christian rock artist and would-be preacher—and a white tank with one of his own drawings on it, sketched on the ribs in Sharpie. When his left arm, tattooed with similar art, hangs by his side, you get the sense that the drawing has just wandered off his shirt onto his skin.
© Amanda Killian
The bright, bristling, illustrative visual style is Ingram’s handiwork, and it covers the band’s merch and animated music videos. The cartoons are reminiscent of MTV interstitials or late-night Adult Swim surrealism— but on merch and album covers the drawings bristle with the sharpness of a tattoo needle.
In a way, their bright visual style helps unite Wieuca’s sprawling discography, which has dipped its toes in everything from southern psych-rock to sample-laden experimental indie, to something that a lot of people would call emo. Their most recent album, 2024’s Truth Management, has tracks like “Are You There God? It’s Me, Wieuca” that feature layered riffs and soaring vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on a Jawbreaker album. The album before that, 2021’s Burning Platform, has an interlude where legendary rapper La Chat gets on the mic and insults the band’s name for a full minute before they launch into the lurching, ironic southern stoner-rock dirge “Man of the House,”a parodic portrait of masculinity. Ingram performs it that night complete with bicep flexes and a quick swing off the rafters.
© Amanda Killian
Wieuca – pronounced, as La Chat made clear in her feature, like Why You Kuh – is a real place, of course. It’s the name of a road here in Atlanta. That seems like a hint towards the band’s real geographic loyalties, so after the show, once we’re all seated together under one roof, I ask them about it.
“We’re an Athens band,” Webster answers immediately. Everyone at the table agrees. They played 40 Watt Club the night before, and it was packed to the gills. “Definitely an Athens band. There’s an attitude in Athens that’s more relaxed. I think we have that. I’d say we’re a college band, but really, this is what happens when people start a band in high school and it just never stops.”
Being school friends, perhaps, explains the way Wieuca’s music gets written: playfully and constantly. Formed in 2012, they’ve released music almost continuously, other than a brief break and re-formation between 2022 and 2023.
“Our music writing style is sort of this idea of parallel play. We’re doing things we like, trying to make each other laugh, and constantly experimenting,” says Cleveland. His setup onstage tonight looked more like a command center than a keyboard; overflowing with wires, pedals, and samplers. In some of Wieuca’s less guitar-driven songs, samples layer in live to create J Dilla-esque shapes from unexpected sounds, some of which are totally unrecognizable. “I don’t think this band would be what it is without the [Roland] SP-404 and SP-808,” Cleveland continues. “Sampling is part of the DNA of this band. We’ll spend —I’m not kidding— whole years finessing a sound that’s just stacks and stacks of samples layered over each other.”
For Wieuca, sourcing the samples is also part of the creative process. At the show, the band displayed a large cardboard lightbulb featuring some of Ingram’s signature art and a phone number that read 706-725-4372. Fans are encouraged to call and leave voicemails. Some might appear in future samples, some not. Part of the humor of it all rests on the idea that Wieuca the band is an LLC, that this is their business hotline. “I love the idea that no one can come for us over a sample because our liability is limited,” Ingram laughs.
Liable or not, always sampling means the band is always recording something, even when they’re not formally in the studio. “We are really always making music and recording it,” says Cleveland. “Will is crazy. He records whole songs before we even get in the studio to learn them.”
Ingram leans back and smiles, a little chagrined. “I want to stop doing that. But as we've gone through different band members and different living situations, being in different cities, sometimes it's easy to get in a room and create something together...and sometimes it's easier to perform it in your car. I’ll do the screams in my car because I can't do them in my apartment.”
Wieuca’s latest singles, 2025’s “The Whole World’s Bitch,” and “Forklift CertifiedFreak,” which dropped in July of 2026, would have given Ingram plenty of screaming sessions — both songs feature heavier, distorted guitars, unexpected samples, and sudden left turns into screams and shouts. The chainsaw, which makes it to the venue just in time, comes with the acrid smell of gasoline; when the band yanks the cord and puts it on the mic for a little industrial noise moment, the lyrics of “Forklift Certified Freak” seem to fall into place. “In the hand of a giant/Clipped-in-visor down OSHA compliant/Eliminate yourself/Become the machine.”
Is it political? Kind of.
There’s certainly a working-class chip on Wieuca’s shoulder. “A lot of our songs are about workers being treated like shit,” Ingram says.
It’s true. There are a lot of ways to be the downtrodden man in rock music: you can punch up, punch back, make fun of your bosses and bullies. Wieuca has done a bit of all of it. But in recent releases, there’s an attitude that feels quintessential to the South: a stubborn urge to grow where you’re planted, to accept the contradictions, coupled with sadness for people who can’t quite get out or make do. 2024’s “Watertower”is a good example. Coat Springsteen’s The River in a layer of kudzu and you’d get close to what this song is doing lyrically. “I shake as I climb the water tower in the sky/That cranes above the pines and dying flowers…Just like the rest, you never moved away from here/Married young, and when the weather's clear/You squint and see it from your yard.”
“Some of our songs from back in the day parodied traditional lifestyles,” Ingram says. “It’s easy to reject it. But down here, there’s a moment when you get close to those things and you're like… maybe I do want this. Maybe one day I can have a little piece of this. Maybe I'll never own a home but maybe I can have a partner that I live with and we have a dog and a fence. If the option to have that goes away, you kind of start thinking, okay… What part of that did I want? What was I buying into? What was real? I think that’s more interesting."
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Ingram trails off, and pauses. We’ve covered a lot of ground tonight. The question of what’s next hangs in the air before I even have to ask it. Is an album in the works? The answer is yes.
“We’re sitting on so many songs right now, just a huge stack of songs,” Cleveland pipes up.
Ingram nods. “So many songs. There’s a new record that’ll come out of them. It speaks to some of those questions, where we’re revisiting southern Christian and gospel roots. There are questions about what parts of that life some of us gave up are actually beautiful and worthy, and if we even get to have them anymore. So, I think that’s going to be new, kind of, but not that new. But it’ll be a good reintroduction to the band. We’re going to tour, too.”
For now, Wieuca’s fans have two singles from their forthcoming album including the latest, “Forklift Certified Freak,” to enjoy on streaming platforms and Bandcamp. Many of those fans were at the show tonight, including a man who coordinated mid-show to propose onstage to his girlfriend. Why at a Wieuca show? According to him, she hadn’t missed a single show in the last five years. The crowd cheers as she says yes, and the band wraps the set to a crowd screaming for more.
That’s not the kind of loyalty you earn by just spinning your wheels; you have to have something special. Wherever Wieuca are and whatever their next adventure sounds like, one thing is clear: people will be listening.
© Amanda Killian
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CREDITS :
Interview: Amanda Killian
Editing: Tyler Brune & Ellen Arden
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