Wildways
The history of Wildways is almost unprecedented on the domestic music scene. Now this is undoubtedly one of the most rapidly developing and gaining audiences in Russia's teams, breaking through from the bottom of the heavy underground. The contract with the major American label Artery Recordings, huge tours around Europe and the CIS countries with full halls of fans, HYIP around every new video of the group, viewing which easily and easily pass for 100 000 mark, very high marks from Western listeners and eminent collectives, and of course It's really a roofing music with a recognizable and fresh sound. In this article we will tell you in detail the history of these wild rockers, and also why their album Into The Wild can and should become the headliner in your player for long weeks and months.
The history of Wildways began in 2009 in Bryansk, where they gathered in the garage and began to play heavy music, calling themselves Sarah Where Is My Tea (SWIMT). The founders of the team are bassist Igor Starostin and guitarist Sergey Novikov, later joined by vocalist Anatoly Borisov, guitarist Denis Pyatkovsky and drummer Kirill Ayuyev at different times. The guys began to move a little from the already used garage, went to other cities, gave concerts at large enough venues like the Plan B club in Moscow, began recording the eponymous EP debut album, which consisted of four tracks and was released at the end of 2009. Soon enough SWIMT was already on hearing in the Russian underground community.
Their next release was the full-length album Desolate, released in 2011, which was qualitatively higher than its predecessor. Stylistically, this was basically a logical continuation of the debut release, but even then there was a certain attraction of the band to more melodic music and the influence of hip-hop culture. To fully experience this audience was in 2013, when the light saw the third album, Sarah Where Is My Tea - Love & Honor, including the iconic tracks "The Idols Inside Us" and "My Habitat".
The album received a really wide resonance, becoming a turning point in the history of the band, which is not surprising, because the material was incredibly steep. This music sounded fresh, interesting and focused on a wider audience. At the same time, the guys to some extent remained true to their roots, it looked exactly like a qualitative development and a huge work done on themselves and their material. Even then they were not easy to perceive as promising newcomers, but a group with big ambitions, which definitely knows what it wants and will do everything to achieve its goals. What to say, if after a big Russian tour in support of the album, which lasted more than a month, SWIMT went to their third European tour. All their experiences in this regard and a rich concert life are beautifully captured in the tour diaries.
Sarah Where Is My Tea was not going to stop there, tasting the fruits of local fame - now they were going to publicly declare themselves in the West. Soon it became clear that to do so they were to some extent hampered by their name, which they perceive abroad in a different way than they would like. Musicians themselves admit that the decision to change the name in 2014 was given to them incredibly hard, and at some point they even regretted it. Although the fans took this news ambiguously and in the majority are painful, now we see that this was a necessary and very correct decision by the group. At that moment, the story of Sarah Where Is My Tea ended and a new one began - under the name of Wildways.
Soon Wildways went to the USA where they had to lock themselves up in the studio for a month to record an album with the famous producer Cameron Mizell, who put his hand to the music of bands like I See Stars, Sleeping with Sirens, Memphis May Fire and Capture The Crown, followed by a series of large and significant announcements. In the summer of 2015, in the midst of the filming of the first video of Faka Faka Yeah, which later made a lot of noise on the network, the band announced that the place of guitarist Denis Pyatkovsky was occupied by the well-known Vyacheslav Kavlenas, both in Russia and abroad.
In early 2016, the news appears that Wildways signed a contract with Artery Recordings, under the auspices of which on March 21 the band released their debut album called Into The Wild. Later in the network, one after another, three more videos for the best tracks from the album. The scandalous and provocative Faka Faka Yeah video follows a much more serious and lyrical Princess, after which everyone saw a very ironic and hilarious clip on track 3 Seconds To Go. Well, the final point was the video on D.O.I.T., which the fans claimed literally from the first days of the release of the album.
The reaction of Russian listeners to Into The Wild was rather ambiguous. Blocks of comments for each video are full of negative messages addressed to the group. Many washed the musicians bone, they discussed the feasibility of signing them on the label and simply stated the popular now "rolled off!". The Western listener did not understand this reaction in any way. Smile was caused by hundreds of likes getting on YouTube comments like "Why so much hate?". Not all were ready to immediately accept the result of the long and laborious work of Wildways, but time put everything in its place.
As a result, the Wildways with their album have thundered all over Russia and the CIS countries, have seriously declared themselves in the West, received an incredible amount of positive feedback from eminent music magazines and colleagues in the shop, are now beloved by their fans and win the hearts of new listeners, while the number of tickets sold at each of their concerts smoothly approaches the thousandth mark.
Recently the guitarist Denis Pyatkovsky returned to the band, who had full relation to the material of the last two albums of Wildways. What is happening now with Wildways is best described by Erik Rikia's delightful documentary about the band's tour life during the Into The Wild Tour, after watching which you do not like, then at least start to respect them and remember how the collective who the moment is the brightest representative of the domestic scene of modern heavy music.
Sorry for my breacking english :)