Brennan Wedl documents those dizzying years spent in the world of ‘twenty-something’. Her radically unvarnished accounts detail an expansive universe that interweaves the everyday with scenes that might include catholic church camps, various awakenings, one-night stands, or collapsed ‘forever’ relationships. The result? An eminently relatable catalog of moments when profound realizations arrive unexpectedly.
While she has been steadily releasing poignant dispatches as a solo artist since 2012, in 2024 she took a striking step forward with a new series of singles. These recordings capture Wedl at her most unbounded and creatively impulsive; delivering sweetly lilting country one minute, and crashing rock the next, ringing out with jangling brightness at times and introspective in hushed acoustic guitar picking elsewhere.
This impulsiveness is something that Wedl wrestles with daily. Much of her material is indirectly inspired by her quest to live simply after the realization that she couldn’t live the life she wanted when drugs and alcohol were involved. However, in a move that is definitive of her approach, she explodes this specific experience into an allegory of life at large. Central is her tug of war between moderation and hedonism. A battle that she may, in any instant, apply to intoxicants, relationships, spirituality, sexual liberty, and beyond. The bubbling undercurrent throughout is a commitment to find comfort in restraint.
Wedl’s knack for encapsulating the moment has been apparent since the success of the queercore band Dazey & The Scouts she co-founded in 2015. The four-piece had a viral resurgence in 2020 as a new audience found themselves drawn to the group’s unapologetic message, and online lore of their sole album.
With a pivotal self-titled debut album due next year, Brennan Wedl proves that she remains viscerally attached to her emotional core and an acutely gifted narrator of life’s highs and lows.
