Wishy: The Best of What’s Next

“Guess I just spent my wishes / Can I get just a few more to set aside?” Wishy’s Kevin Krauter pleads on “Sick Sweet”—a crystalline piece of dreamy pop-punk with a nothing-to-lose sense of romantic idealism. “It’s so obvious that every touch feels like an afterlife / And I really wanna die tonight!” he sings, like a less morbid Morrissey on the runaway love song that kicks off an album about trying whatever luck you may or may not have. Wishy started as a side project. Its two principal vocalists and songwriters, Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, were already in a band together called Mana when they began writing music that didn’t necessarily fit under the Mana umbrella at the time. Wishy was a merger of sorts, of two bands consisting of almost the exact same lineup, rounded out by Mitch Collins, Dimitri Morris and Connor Host.

The catalyst that turned Wishy from a side to an entrée, so to speak, was a session in Los Angeles (where Krauter and Pitchkites are speaking to me from, via Zoom) with Steve Marino of Angel Du$t and Ben Lundsmaine. From this session sprung some of the songs that would make up Wishy’s forthcoming debut album Triple Seven and their December 2023 EP Paradise. After releasing an EP in June named after their Mana origins, Wishy saw a new road worth taking. “Somewhere down the line, we were having conversations of like, ‘Both of these [bands] seem like something we want to pursue, but it doesn’t really make sense to have two bands,” Krauter explains. “So, we just merged it into one.” Pitchkites nods. “We just changed the name and added a bunch of new songs to our catalog,” she adds.

Most Popular

Krauter and Pitchkites’s musical inspirations and experiences are vast, with each artist bringing their own multifaceted musical history to the project, putting their ideas together and seeing which pieces fit. Growing up in a strict, devout Christian household in central Indiana, Krauter was forbidden from listening to secular music, so it was a shock to his system when his older brother exposed him to blink-182 and Good Charlotte via LimeWire downloads. His love for circa-Y2K pop punk led him to check out the alt-rock of the same era—bands like the Strokes and the Shins. In high school, he played in a metalcore band before pivoting away from heavy music in search of a lighter, gentler sound.

Pitchkites also grew up in central Indiana, where she sang in youth choirs and learned to play piano by covering her favorite Regina Spektor songs. In high school, she graduated from the piano to the electric guitar and began recording her own music in GarageBand on her phone or her mom’s iPad and uploading it to SoundCloud. In college, she played in a string of short-lived rock bands. “We would practice for a couple weeks for one show and then never play another show again,” she says. In lieu of a steady, lasting collaboration, Pitchkites started Push Pop, her solo synth-pop project, with just a “guitar and a MIDI keyboard in [her] room.” She considers Wishy to be, in some ways, her first “real” band. When she and Krauter met through the Indianapolis music scene, they instantly bonded over their shared love of twee and dream-pop, both citing Heavenly and the Sugarcubes as mutual inspirations.

On Triple Seven, Wishy weave their vast web of multi-genre influences into a colorful indie rock record with lots of heart. It’s a record that often feels like it came from a bygone era, owing its sensibilities to various sonic touchstones of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. The more shoegazey tracks like “Sick Sweet,” “Little While” and “Honey” immediately bring to mind the dreamy distortion that made Lush and Slowdive household names 30+ years ago. “Persuasion”’s anguished hook, stretching out the line “you toooooold me” and following it up with an unbridled “ow OW!”-adlib feels straight out of Weezer’s early catalog, while Krauter’s pop punk whine on “Love on the Outside” recalls the more low-key, earnest cuts from the Sellout bands like Green Day and Jimmy Eat World, back when their angst dominated the alternative airwaves.

This only ramps up on the singsongy, titular chorus of closer “Spit,” with Pitchkites teasing “Who’s gonna break my heart?” over a somber snare. The guitars on “Busted” make the track sound like a fuzzed out Smashing Pumpkins song, and it’s immediately followed by “Just Like Sunday,” whose laid-back layered pop vocals from Pitchkites and frosty production make it sound like a DIY take on the girl groups of MTV’s Total Request Live days.

It’s not just the songs that make Wishy feel like some of the MTV generation’s greatest progeny. The aesthetic of their music videos is hazy and saturated in a very ‘90s way—media flooded with a generous usage of primary colors, odd camera angles and cartoonish but rudimentary visual effects. Krauter and Pitchkites both take a hands-on approach to creating the visual accompaniments to Wishy’s music: Krauter designed the band’s flower logo, which appears in the “Spinning” music video and the first run of shirts that Pitchkites—a professional seamstress—embroidered herself. Tomatoes are another recurring visual motif—the hacky sack that the band members kick around in the “Triple Seven” video is shaped like one, as is the slot machine on the album cover. The slot machine motif is all over the record, the most obvious nod to it being the jackpot-themed album title. The title track’s trippy, metatextual, casino-themed music video feels like one that would get torn apart by Beavis and Butthead—that’s how you know it’s good.

Wishy describe the process behind their music videos as “very spontaneous,” often impromptu collaborations “made with homies who are just down to entertain whatever funny ideas we have,” as Krauter puts it. “When I look back on the videos I feel really good about them. In the past I’ve done music videos where it’s someone else’s idea entirely, and it’s fun, but it doesn’t feel as connected,” he adds. That spontaneity and familiarity come through strongly on “Love on the Outside,” a track that feels like one you’d hear live at a house party while making nervous eye contact with your crush across the room, and one that would get stuck in your head whenever you remember that night months later. You can hear the nostalgia beginning to take shape in real time, the memory cocooning itself in a daydreamy haze.

“For the ‘Love on the Outside’ video, I had a party at my house and we set up our band in the living room and played a live set for all the guests while our friend Rich filmed it,” Pitchkites tells me. “It was kind of killing two birds with one stone, because at the time I had to move out of that house very soon. So I was like, ‘Okay, this is the last big blowout in this house, but it can also be the Wishy “Love on the Outside” music video.’ A lot of our ideas are just kind of out of convenience.” Krauter and Pitchkites credit this whimsical atmosphere and its ample opportunities for collaboration to their local scene. When we think of thriving Midwest DIY scenes, Indianapolis is usually not the first to come to mind—the focus tends to be on larger cities like Chicago and Detroit and their contributions to punk, emo, hardcore and indie rock.

There’s a special kind of creative freedom and lack of baggage that comes with making music in a city not tangled up in the bustling demands of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, especially one whose music scene the artists have a direct hand in developing. “In a place like Chicago, there’s enough people and enough history behind the music scene that there’s a wave to ride on,” Krauter notes. “But in Indianapolis, it’s really like—whatever is happening there, it’s up to you and your friends to make it happen.” Another upside to the anonymity and self-determination of Indianapolis’s small but thriving music scene is the lack of clout-chasing and egoism that often runs rampant in other cities, whose infighting and competition can overshadow the music itself. The way Wishy describe it, there seems to be almost a complete absence of opportunism. With a small DIY scene that’s really just what the musicians make of it, there’s no barrier to entry and no threat of scarcity—nobody’s vying to be the next big band out of Indianapolis; that’s not really a thing. “No one’s starting a band to get famous,” says Pitchkites. “Everyone who’s starting a band is starting a band because they love music. That’s why we started our band.”

The music scene in Indianapolis is close-knit out of necessity. According to Krauter, pretty much anyone who plays local shows in Indianapolis knows everyone else who does. It’s the kind of town where, because of its size, most local musicians end up playing the same rotation of venues—Wishy give a special shoutout to State Street Pub and its owner (and friend of the band) Mark Tester. State Street Pub housed some of the earliest Wishy shows, and it’s also a place where, because of Indianapolis’s relatively small town status, you’re likely to see (or end up on) a lot of mixed-genre bills. Indianapolis shows offer crowds a chance to see sets from a post-punk band, an acoustic solo singer-songwriter and someone’s ambient project all in the same night.

Now that Wishy have matriculated from the Indiana DIY circuit and to the nationwide club circuit, their tourmates and co-signers are similarly varied when it comes to their genres and fanbases. They’ve shared bills with legacy acts like emo revolutionaries American Football and the prolific garage pop tricksters Guided By Voices (both of whom are bands that take similar hometown pride in their Midwest roots), as well as peers like Southern slacker rock everyman MJ Lenderman and Texas nu-gaze outfit Narrow Head. Touring has been chaotic and unfamiliar, but loads of fun, and both Krauter and Pitchkites are quick to express their gratitude for the bands that have taken a chance on them. They’re good natured about the whiplash that comes with playing in a new city every night: “It’s funny to play like, a sold out Bowery Ballroom show to like 500 people versus like, two people in Denton, Texas,” Krauter laughs. “It’s forcing me to be more well-traveled—I’m a homebody.”

Being on the road has also given Wishy ample opportunities to try out unreleased material in front of an audience. They still love playing the Triple Seven tracks, but it’s clear that the grind hasn’t stopped, and that Pitchkites and Krauter both have new music on the brain—specifically an EP that they’ve been working on and testing out at their live shows. One song in particular, Pitchkites describes as “a ripper.” It’s one of her favorites to play live: “Kevin wrote it. He writes really fun guitar parts.”

It’s clear that the members of Wishy have immense respect for one another—not just as musicians, but as people. They wouldn’t be able to make this happen if they didn’t. The unpredictability of touring has been a litmus test for the band’s friendships, one they’ve aced so far, strengthening their inter-band bonds and gaining utmost faith in one another. “Even if we have a rough experience [on tour], the band still gets along so well and can joke about it,” says Pitchkites. “Everyone’s got a good attitude. No divas in the group. Everyone’s just along for the ride.”

“Running in circles / My feet barely touch the ground / Have you heard I’m back in town?” Pitchkites sings among buzzy guitars a reverberating rhythm section on the beautifully disorienting “Little While,” a track whose auditory and emotional whirlwind immediately comes to mind while Wishy’s co-bandleaders are discussing their experiences adjusting to life on (and off) tour. At the song’s whirring outro, the instruments bleed together—except for one steadily strummed guitar chord, as the tempo slows down until the noise dissipates completely. It sounds like a band finding their footing, taking a moment to come down from a daydream and catch their breath while they can.

Wishy’s Triple Seven is out August 16 via Winspear.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.