Nashville has no shortage of promising rock bands, but The Wans are one to keep an eye out for well outside of Music City. Hell, you may have heard them already: they’ve opened for Pearl Jam and Beck, and been featured on a number of TV shows and sporting events (including, yes, Nashville).
On the band’s debut album, He Said, She Said (out September 9 and produced by alt-country’s new favorite producer, Dave Cobb), they mix the well-trodden influences of Black Sabbath and Jimmy Page, combining them with grunge’s most thrashing elements, and ending up somewhere between Queens of the Stone Age and the Dead Weather. Flavorwire is pleased to premiere “Tired,” a cut from He Said, She Said in which unrelenting percussion reiterates singer Simon Kerr’s frustrated scream.
“There’s no coded message in these lyrics,” drummer Mark Petaccia says of the song. “I guess I always thought of it as the end of a relationship. That broken, deflated, exhausted, tired feeling that happens when you’re sure it’s over. Coupled with the anxious energy the verse rhythm creates, it sounds like a feeling we’re all familiar with.”
“Sometimes I mess with people and say we sound like Stevie Ray Vaughn mixed with Coldplay, but that’s just me being a smartass,” Kerr says. “‘Tired’ definitely has a Nirvana kind of feel with a mix of some other ’90s bands like Mudhoney.”
(Photo by Jason Lee Denton)