Winged Wheel – Desert So Green (2026) Review: If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation. But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree. The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump, who played in Spray Paint and ran the multimedia record label Monofonus Press before moving to Kingston, NY to help launch the esteemed venue Tubby’s; Cleveland’s Matthew J. Rolin, who releases solo guitar music and teams with wife Jen Powers in the Powers/Rolin Duo; and Detroit underground lifer Fred Thomas, whose many entanglements have lately included Tyvek and Idle Ray. On their 2022 debut album No Island, that foursome channeled decades’ worth of kosmische, post-punk, and psych into searching, meditative music with kick. It was an album built on trance-inducing repetition yet still grounded in decisively human force, the space-age surrealism of its droning synthesizers beautifully interacting with the scraping immediacy of its guitars and drums. Despite ostensibly working as zone-out music, it had a sense of embodiment that flew in the face of streaming-era passivity. That physicality intensified on LP2 when they added Shelley and Lonnie “Palmtree” Slack from Water Damage, an Austin combo who let their hard-crashing apocalyptic grooves spiral out into infinity. Desert So Green, their third album, drops this Friday. It trades out some of the blustery, noisy tendencies of Big Hotel in favor of something a bit more pensive and reined-in. Winged Wheel began playing live shows in the summer of 2024, and rather than ramping up their aggression, performing together seems to have grounded and focused them. The arrangements unfold more quietly and patiently, as if they’re zooming in on details within their vast creation rather than giving you the widescreen view. It’s a fascinating and unique evolution, the sound of a band discovering its inner workings and moving with purpose. In keeping with that transformation, Winged Wheel are more song-based here than ever before, even if those songs are haunted incantations that don’t adhere to conventional pop structures. The increased attention to form and structure comes across in the singles, which run the gamut from the pounding, dissonant post-hardcore exercise “Speed Table” to the gracefully gliding guitar showcase “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home.” Most effervescent among the advance tracks is “I See Poseurs Every Day,” which plays sort of like ML Buch’s attempt at a Pixies song: a lively rhythm section crashing through a surreal hall of mirrors that smells like winterfresh gum. Despite the shift toward songwriting, Desert So Green is less like a collection of tracks than an immersive environment (one that, as per the album title, sometimes subverts expectations). Multiple vocalists come into the frame throughout, but the singing feels less like the center of attention than one element in a complex landscape, especially since so often they seem to be casting a spell rather than addressing the audience. This is a real collective effort, and each track reflects that, blurring the individual contributions into something grand, distinctive, and perfectly off-kilter. Unlike most supergroups, there’s no evidence of competing egos — just the sound of brilliant artists putting their heads together, honing in on an alchemy all their own. — Stereogum Track List: 01 Canvas 11 02 Canvas 2 03 Speed Table 04 More Frog Poems 05 Beautiful Holy Jewel Home 06 Canvas 8 07 Bird Spells 08 I See Poseurs Every Day 09 The Suite Goes Quiet Media Report: Genre: post-rock, psychedelic rock Origin: Detroit, Michigan, USA Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26) Note: If you like the music, support the artist