Every week, a different FADER editor compiles a playlist to highlight a new release and give you a guide to that artist’s web of influences and peers. These Staff Selects live in our Spotify app, alongside GEN Fs from our archives and playlists for each issue. Today, it’s Amber Bravo on the Wu Lyf's breakup, their entrance into the illustrious club of cultish bro rock and its inevitable demise.
Wu Lyf cryptically imploded this past weekend with a redacted, end-of-it-all YouTube post, which may or may not indicate a psychotic break or simply a premature dissolution of a promising band of young bros. Frontman Ellery James Roberts wrote the accompanying text of the new and final track, "T R I U M P H," stating:
"By the time I wrote this I was all ready gone. You know you aint got nothing but time, but time isn't an infinite currency I want to see wasted. If this is our last month living, apocalypse looming, I am not going to spend my final hours waiting in purgatory. I am done. There is nothing here that inspires/ interests me beyond the emptiness for dreams. and I don't want to spend my life asleep; dreaming of a...."Wake up! We stay safe/ everything is golden/ in this place.
"WU LYF is dead to me. The sincerity of "Go tell fire" was lost in the bull shit of maintaining face in the world we live. Clap your hands chimp everybody's watching. A year spent losing faith; Innocence lost wide eyes see clear the dark. There's blood running down streets of every city in the world, what's a song to do, pretend it mean everything/nothing to you. Another distraction from the world we live. I and I struggle for a based positivity; Get free or die trying; J C Hung him self up for the easy way out. so Broken Mama Cita be kind to me."
Wu Lyf is just one more in the list of early deaths in our current rock landscape, suggesting that maybe the genre is suffering from the hyper trajectory of music today. Basically, the lifespan of a band that ought to have raged on for years and garnered a passionate and cultish following can now be wrapped up in short of a decade. Maybe we live longer only to accomodate multiple selves. Curious to see what becomes of these dudes, and while we ponder this this, let's listen to some other once vital (and in a few cases reborn) rock bands and mourn our greater collective loss. Here's to hoping for us and for Roberts there's still something left to look forward to.
