Artist Profile: Wieuca

Wieuca, the genre-transient rock band based in Atlanta, Georgia, has undergone a number of permutations, spurred by the purity and flexibility of its various musicians, and, now, as they work toward their next album, they have found a sense of constancy through their experimentations, etching out yet another unique sound as they enter a fresh creative rebirth.

The band, led in its original lineup by enigmatic frontman Will Ingram and wily guitar player Jack O’Reilly, began like many others: as a high school band serving as an outlet for the musical yearnings of its founders.

Yet, they quickly gained a reputation outside of their initially hyper-local music scene, experimenting with sampled drums and protruding a raw energy that was undeniable in their live performances.

Their first two projects, There is No Balance (a distinctly alt-country effort) and Guilt Complex (a more indie-leaning collection), sprung forth from what served as the loosely original lineup of the band.

Yet, as times changed, so did the band, and, through the local music scene, Ingram met two of the current core members of the band: Andrew Cleveland and Jack Webster. At the time, both were experienced musicians and had played with Wieuca in the past, and, as members of the original band slowly began to fade away, the two waited in the wings for their opportunity to come, seeing the potential that was there in the unbridled sonic energy Wieuca possessed.

“I admired how Will kind of ran things as the front man,” said Webster, “and I liked how perpetual the rate that they were producing stuff was. [I knew that] this was a good fit for me, and, even though there were still some holes, Andrew really was able to fill those out in a big way.”

Once Cleveland and Webster joined the band, an entirely new echelon opened up for their musical pursuits. With the combined technical and rhythmic knowledge of the three, the band leaned even heavier into their use of technology like SP-404s, and, as they delved deeper and deeper into the limits of what their sound could be, they felt both more confident in their cohesiveness and more unsatiated by what they had accomplished so far.

Yet, the relative instability of their line-up came both with advantages and drawbacks. While all of the members of the band were forced to become more versatile, the two albums they produced within this time frame,  2021’s Burning Platform and 2024’s Truth Management,  featured somewhat disparate and evolving soundscapes: a representation of the period of uncertainty that the band was going through.

Nevertheless, the quality of these two albums serves as a testament to the commitment and the skill of the band’s core members:

“We're all very adaptable musicians,” said Cleveland, “it's not hard to say that we're very good with how we play and how we learn songs. Jack or I could join another band for two weeks to go on tour… We’re all very practiced; we’ve also spent so much time in our bedrooms, learning our instruments, that transitional phases are pretty adaptable.”

Their last record, Truth Management, more than any other represented this feeling of uncertainty. After over a decade in existence, there was an impending feeling that the band might be breaking up, which in turn brought on both a sense of finality and a sense of experimentation with complete abandonment. For the most part, the group left behind their traditional song structures, working with new sounds and disregarding the eventual component of live performances of the songs.

Instead they focused on honing in the best and most wild version of their sound they could wrench from the depths of their creative hearts, and, when it was done, they were relatively surprised to find that people actually enjoyed the experimentations they had undertaken.

Now, with a new drummer (Matt Daniell) and a fresh sense of certainty, Wieuca has begun working on their new album: a project that serves as a testament to the years of trials they have undergone to carve out a continued artistic legacy in the burgeoning Atlanta music scene. They are legends in their community, and they are ever-expanding and ever-permutating.

“I'd say we're more of a unit right now than on the last record. We've just gotten better at figuring out who's going to do what and navigating that chaos, giving a little more structure to it on the album-making side. The last record was maybe the most like, ‘Who gives a f*ck how these songs are structured, let's just let's just do what we feel like,” said Ingram, “That was kind of a green light… So I think we're looking at what we've been working on, in a way, is like sharpening that and making it less completely random and more intentional, but the final product is probably just as insane.”