Interview - Speaking 'Love Language' With Will King Of Windwaker

  • Interview - Speaking 'Love Language' With Will King Of Windwaker
    POSTED

    windwaker

    Ascendant Wagga Wagga metallers Windwaker have built an empire over the years based on explosive innovation and scintillating contrasts. On their debut record Love LanguageWindwaker wrestle and reflect on the unpredictable nature of love across a super-charged twelve tracks, ultimately gifting rabid chaos flexed with glistening melodics and a staggering display of the band's measured progression since first emerging back in 2017.  Just prior to the release of the critically acclaimed album we had a chat with silky smooth vocalist Will King, exploring the inner workings of the musical romance that is Windwaker and what it means to be spitting Love Language in the chaos of modernity. 

    Will, Windwaker are about to drop a record, Love Language via freaking Fearless Records, how are you feeling about that being an actual factual sentence?

    "It's crazy! It's been a fucking whirlwind over the last two months, because all of the singles have been released pretty close together, it's been nuts."

    Looking back to when you were younger and thinking about getting started on this musical journey, did you ever think it'd be possible for you to release an album via a label as iconic as Fearless Records?

    "Well did as a kid I wasn't even thinking about music really. I was consuming music. I was listening to a lot of bands.  I grew up on on stuff like Trivium and Dream Theater and all sorts of stuff.  But my trajectory personally,  I was studying architecture, and I did not expect to go down the music route,  but somehow ended up here. Yeah, I don't know how that happened. But here we are."

    That's a fascinating detour from architecture to music, Will and it's actually the second time I've heard it. The Australian record producer Catherine J Marks also switched careers from architecture to music. I interviewed her once for a podcast and she said she found that architecture was quite helpful to her in her abilities and she could see quite a correlation between the two worlds. Have you found that too?

    "It's the tangible aspects. In relation to architecture, you're designing something on paper and then you see it come to light in a tangible way. The same thing happens with music, you'll make a soundscape and then finally it ends up on a physical disc or vinyl and you can hold it. I don't know if that was a concious choice for me, but I do know that when I hold our CD in my hand now, I feel things,  I'm like "oh, shit, this is a real thing, that I created out of thin air". So there could be a correlation there."

    Now this record that causes you to feel things, is called Love Language. Is it really all about your relationship with love?

    "Well, not my relationship personally, but all of the members. The lockdown provided us all with so much time for introspection. Time for absorbing life, instead of just meticulously focussing on music. Coming out of adolescence, where we were confused and looking to belong, there was so many moments where we felt like a fly-on-the-wall to ourselves. Looking in at how our lives have gone. We were given that time to really experience that on an external level and experience connecting with others and having intimate relationships and that is what translates through the story of the album. Even in the sonics it is a lot more bright than the more dark and brooding previous material."

    I was going to pick up on that it is definitely a brighter, more optimistic soundscape. Was that something you were trying to cultivate or was it more of a natural occurrence?

    " I don't know if it was necessarily implied, but you never really know what's going to come out when you go into the studio. We're a DIY band. So our drummer Chris Lilac , he's our producer. So when we stepped into the studio, it was kind of like whatever feelings come out, come out. And that was just an intuitive approach for us. The intuition kicked in and that gut feeling was let's just write shit that's fun this time and really like, go to town. Some of the ear candy that comes up in obviously very feel good stuff like EDM. The vibe is a lot more uplfiting, the rock elements are a lot more driving and puncy. Empire was a lot more confused in its direction. Love Language flips that on its head and says here's life, here's all the beautiful things that you can experience, let's package it into a record and that record kind of embodies who we are as people now and where we're going"

    People really like your cover of Toxic, it must be said! 

    "Do they though? Do they? Nah, it's kind of a bit of a gimmick, but if people are out there spinning Toxic unironically, and digging it, that makes me happy. That was such a spontaneous thing, we were literally drunk and we were like "let's put out a Britney Spears cover as our debut on Fearless". I think everyone was expecting after two years without releasing any new music that we'd throwdown something heavy and serious. So we decided to just troll everyone and drop a Britney Spears cover and it slaps, it slaps." 

    Now, this conversation is taking place on ZOOM which is exactly how you wrote a lot of the material for Love Language. What was that experience like?

    "Sporadic, very chaotic. Some of it was done in this room. Then the restirction were eased in a few places for a bit when we could get into AirBnB's together and write, but a lot of it was done over ZOOM. We had so many ideas. Dropboxes full of ideas and riffs and we were like "how can we make this all glue". So, yeah the writing process was so scattered on this album, and I honsestly don't know how it came all together, but it has materialized and is now something that exists in the real world."

     It's a pretty difficult thing to do, especially for a band like you with such an even input as songwriters, but you clearly coped with it really well!

    "We had to adapt in any way we could, like, obviously, given the circumstances, it was not a situation where we could just be like, alright, let's wait around to see what happens, because I think when it hit,  everyone had a fair inkling that it was gonna linger for years and years.  We kind of knew that was gonna be a thing. So we're like, let's adapt, we got to, like, move on this quick. Because otherwise, you know, we're just gonna fizzle out and then maybe,  our motivation towards or our love towards music, would  just wither away because we're not doing anything. So we were very conscious of just being like, full steam ahead. The world is in shambles right now. We've just got to move.  Do anything we can. And any sort of effort we can make,  be it piecing melodies together over ZOOM or sending Voice Memos over Facebook, anything we could sort of piece together that it was at least like an effort.  All those like one percents added up. And then by the time everything opened back up again, we could then you know, just put all the pieces of the puzzle together and it was a coherent album.

    You're from outside of Wagga Wagga, so being distanced from the rest of the world is probably something that you were more accustomed to than others. Do you think that growing up in a regional area made you more adaptable to the challenge than someone who might have grown up in an inner-city area?  

    "It was very easy to find each other here. I knew of Chris and Indey and Jesse, because there wasn't really a subculture here. So we were all off in our own lanes, practicing our instruments, seperate from each other, consuming a lot of music. A lot more consumption than creation going on. When we all came together, we had this epiphany moment that we could really do this. Then when we moved to Melbourne, everything fell into place. Like, we had no intentions of being a signed band or anything like that. It was just like, this is fun, let's ride the wave. Because in the back of my mind, I was always gonna go back to uni. So I it kinda felt like a fun thing to do for now, be young, let's fucking get lit, get drunk, have parties chill out with everyone, and then it's just snowballed into what it is now. I guess it's a career path for us." 

    It's definitely a career path now! On a personal level, for someone who never considered themselves a potential career musician, you have a very well developed voice. Was that something that you had been working on anyway?

    "I started seriously singing when I was about 19 or 20. I'd been in school choir and some high school rock bands, done some stuff like that, but it was really due to our drummer Chris that inspired me to explore it more. I met up with him in Wagga, while I was in a different rock band, and we has 17, or 18, and producing bands in Wagga, and I came across him and he was like "I think you have quite a promising range." At the time, I wasn't really utilizing my voice properly. So he was  going, "what if you tried this" Or "have you tried this?" and he was gifting me all these new perspectives."



    "And then from then it was like, all the music that I had been consuming over the years, I was like, "Oh, I see how like, my my vocal cords and all the muscles, I see how this connects with the music now".  My benefit was just growing up with so many different types of music, like hip hop and, and rock and all that, that it influenced the way I used my muscles very early on. So yeah, I think it's it's been like a natural thing. I haven't like, forced myself to sing different styles or whatever. It's just that's what translates when I like hear a song or hear a riff. I'm like, Oh, this would work over it. And then you know, it could be like, fucking deconstructed from Eminem, and I don't really know it's just subconsciously ingrained into me. So yeah, I never really like intended to be a singer. I was originally a drummer."

    In terms of the stuff that you were listening to when you were growing up, can you hear in your own voice definitive influences on your vocal style?

    "Absolutely. Obviously it is brought to my awareness when someone else will tell me, but it really comes down to  eveything you digest influencing what comes out. People can say that you have a unique or distinctive voice, but it's all characterized and informed by the things that you consume. What music you listen to, what movies you watch, all of those sorts of things will become ingrained in your being and everything that comes out will be the result of how your senses convert into feelings and glue to those songs."

     I'm curious if there are any songs on Love Language that you're immensely proud of, personally?

    "Cathartically, I'm immensely proud of 'Hide & Seek'.  'Hide & Seek' was a chance for me to really get everything that I went through as a kid and as a teen. Honestly, I didn't realise how satisfying it would be to actually verbalise those things. It's like going to therapy.  You keep these things bottled up. When when we finished writing that song, I was very emotional. As surface level listen, it is easy to get into it, it's a core song, but the more you dive into it, I'm articulating my  suffering in that period of my life. That's now gonna get projected into the world, and hopefully, somebody stumbles upon it and hears it at the right time and in the right place. And it means enough that, you know, it'll just cushion the fall a little bit and make them appreciate life as it is because things do get better."

    Outside of music is there anything else you feel you're a Maniac for?

    "A maniac like a rebel? Yeah. Oh, God, I don't even know how to answer that question. I'm a Virgo. So I'm a pretty like controlled mind. A lot of my chaotic times are past me I feel.  I can be a little bit of a goblin on tour though, if that blunt comes out it's on. I know how the night is going to end and it's going to end in me sitting in a trolley and somebody pushing me down the street"

    What else do you love in this world?

    "Honestly, just meeting people and having new experiences. Like I said in with in terms of  art in itself like the creative vs the consumer, internal vs external, like that balance, I wouldn't be able to love myself if I wasn't like energized by the people around me. So just keeping like a tight circle and a good like solid foundation of people that are not necessarily like minded but people that have the right intentions and, you know, push me to be myself and you know, push me to make necessary changes. That's really what is important to me in my life.

    If you could have one song play every time you enter a room like you're a pro-wrester, what song would you want it to be?

    "Dude, I'm not even joking. 'Hero' by Chad Kroeger. I just walk in just like fucking strutting, wind blowing.  Nobody can not feel good, after listening to that song."

    Please make that a Windwaker cover, I need to hear this! 

    We'll have to do it for 'Like A Version'.

    Windwaker does Nickelback on triple j, you read it here first, Maniacs. Now you're about to head out on tour with I Prevail and Motionless In White are you excited about being on that tour?

    "I am absolutely stoked to be on that tour. I think the last venue we played was a 400 cap or something, so to jump straight into a full run of these like bucketlist venues. That in itself is like mind boggling, like we've already achieved just a plethora of things that we just never thought we would achieve. So everything from here is just you know, a gift and we're really looking forward to that tour and just vibing with them."

    miw tour
    Tickets for all shows are on sale now via Destroy All Lines.

    Windwaker are also touring Australia in November in support of Enter Shikari and Creeper

    ww ll

    Listen To Love Language

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windwaker

Ascendant Wagga Wagga metallers Windwaker have built an empire over the years based on explosive innovation and scintillating contrasts. On their debut record Love LanguageWindwaker wrestle and reflect on the unpredictable nature of love across a super-charged twelve tracks, ultimately gifting rabid chaos flexed with glistening melodics and a staggering display of the band's measured progression since first emerging back in 2017.  Just prior to the release of the critically acclaimed album we had a chat with silky smooth vocalist Will King, exploring the inner workings of the musical romance that is Windwaker and what it means to be spitting Love Language in the chaos of modernity. 

Will, Windwaker are about to drop a record, Love Language via freaking Fearless Records, how are you feeling about that being an actual factual sentence?

"It's crazy! It's been a fucking whirlwind over the last two months, because all of the singles have been released pretty close together, it's been nuts."

Looking back to when you were younger and thinking about getting started on this musical journey, did you ever think it'd be possible for you to release an album via a label as iconic as Fearless Records?

"Well did as a kid I wasn't even thinking about music really. I was consuming music. I was listening to a lot of bands.  I grew up on on stuff like Trivium and Dream Theater and all sorts of stuff.  But my trajectory personally,  I was studying architecture, and I did not expect to go down the music route,  but somehow ended up here. Yeah, I don't know how that happened. But here we are."

That's a fascinating detour from architecture to music, Will and it's actually the second time I've heard it. The Australian record producer Catherine J Marks also switched careers from architecture to music. I interviewed her once for a podcast and she said she found that architecture was quite helpful to her in her abilities and she could see quite a correlation between the two worlds. Have you found that too?

"It's the tangible aspects. In relation to architecture, you're designing something on paper and then you see it come to light in a tangible way. The same thing happens with music, you'll make a soundscape and then finally it ends up on a physical disc or vinyl and you can hold it. I don't know if that was a concious choice for me, but I do know that when I hold our CD in my hand now, I feel things,  I'm like "oh, shit, this is a real thing, that I created out of thin air". So there could be a correlation there."

Now this record that causes you to feel things, is called Love Language. Is it really all about your relationship with love?

"Well, not my relationship personally, but all of the members. The lockdown provided us all with so much time for introspection. Time for absorbing life, instead of just meticulously focussing on music. Coming out of adolescence, where we were confused and looking to belong, there was so many moments where we felt like a fly-on-the-wall to ourselves. Looking in at how our lives have gone. We were given that time to really experience that on an external level and experience connecting with others and having intimate relationships and that is what translates through the story of the album. Even in the sonics it is a lot more bright than the more dark and brooding previous material."

I was going to pick up on that it is definitely a brighter, more optimistic soundscape. Was that something you were trying to cultivate or was it more of a natural occurrence?

" I don't know if it was necessarily implied, but you never really know what's going to come out when you go into the studio. We're a DIY band. So our drummer Chris Lilac , he's our producer. So when we stepped into the studio, it was kind of like whatever feelings come out, come out. And that was just an intuitive approach for us. The intuition kicked in and that gut feeling was let's just write shit that's fun this time and really like, go to town. Some of the ear candy that comes up in obviously very feel good stuff like EDM. The vibe is a lot more uplfiting, the rock elements are a lot more driving and puncy. Empire was a lot more confused in its direction. Love Language flips that on its head and says here's life, here's all the beautiful things that you can experience, let's package it into a record and that record kind of embodies who we are as people now and where we're going"

People really like your cover of Toxic, it must be said! 

"Do they though? Do they? Nah, it's kind of a bit of a gimmick, but if people are out there spinning Toxic unironically, and digging it, that makes me happy. That was such a spontaneous thing, we were literally drunk and we were like "let's put out a Britney Spears cover as our debut on Fearless". I think everyone was expecting after two years without releasing any new music that we'd throwdown something heavy and serious. So we decided to just troll everyone and drop a Britney Spears cover and it slaps, it slaps." 

Now, this conversation is taking place on ZOOM which is exactly how you wrote a lot of the material for Love Language. What was that experience like?

"Sporadic, very chaotic. Some of it was done in this room. Then the restirction were eased in a few places for a bit when we could get into AirBnB's together and write, but a lot of it was done over ZOOM. We had so many ideas. Dropboxes full of ideas and riffs and we were like "how can we make this all glue". So, yeah the writing process was so scattered on this album, and I honsestly don't know how it came all together, but it has materialized and is now something that exists in the real world."

 It's a pretty difficult thing to do, especially for a band like you with such an even input as songwriters, but you clearly coped with it really well!

"We had to adapt in any way we could, like, obviously, given the circumstances, it was not a situation where we could just be like, alright, let's wait around to see what happens, because I think when it hit,  everyone had a fair inkling that it was gonna linger for years and years.  We kind of knew that was gonna be a thing. So we're like, let's adapt, we got to, like, move on this quick. Because otherwise, you know, we're just gonna fizzle out and then maybe,  our motivation towards or our love towards music, would  just wither away because we're not doing anything. So we were very conscious of just being like, full steam ahead. The world is in shambles right now. We've just got to move.  Do anything we can. And any sort of effort we can make,  be it piecing melodies together over ZOOM or sending Voice Memos over Facebook, anything we could sort of piece together that it was at least like an effort.  All those like one percents added up. And then by the time everything opened back up again, we could then you know, just put all the pieces of the puzzle together and it was a coherent album.

You're from outside of Wagga Wagga, so being distanced from the rest of the world is probably something that you were more accustomed to than others. Do you think that growing up in a regional area made you more adaptable to the challenge than someone who might have grown up in an inner-city area?  

"It was very easy to find each other here. I knew of Chris and Indey and Jesse, because there wasn't really a subculture here. So we were all off in our own lanes, practicing our instruments, seperate from each other, consuming a lot of music. A lot more consumption than creation going on. When we all came together, we had this epiphany moment that we could really do this. Then when we moved to Melbourne, everything fell into place. Like, we had no intentions of being a signed band or anything like that. It was just like, this is fun, let's ride the wave. Because in the back of my mind, I was always gonna go back to uni. So I it kinda felt like a fun thing to do for now, be young, let's fucking get lit, get drunk, have parties chill out with everyone, and then it's just snowballed into what it is now. I guess it's a career path for us." 

It's definitely a career path now! On a personal level, for someone who never considered themselves a potential career musician, you have a very well developed voice. Was that something that you had been working on anyway?

"I started seriously singing when I was about 19 or 20. I'd been in school choir and some high school rock bands, done some stuff like that, but it was really due to our drummer Chris that inspired me to explore it more. I met up with him in Wagga, while I was in a different rock band, and we has 17, or 18, and producing bands in Wagga, and I came across him and he was like "I think you have quite a promising range." At the time, I wasn't really utilizing my voice properly. So he was  going, "what if you tried this" Or "have you tried this?" and he was gifting me all these new perspectives."



"And then from then it was like, all the music that I had been consuming over the years, I was like, "Oh, I see how like, my my vocal cords and all the muscles, I see how this connects with the music now".  My benefit was just growing up with so many different types of music, like hip hop and, and rock and all that, that it influenced the way I used my muscles very early on. So yeah, I think it's it's been like a natural thing. I haven't like, forced myself to sing different styles or whatever. It's just that's what translates when I like hear a song or hear a riff. I'm like, Oh, this would work over it. And then you know, it could be like, fucking deconstructed from Eminem, and I don't really know it's just subconsciously ingrained into me. So yeah, I never really like intended to be a singer. I was originally a drummer."

In terms of the stuff that you were listening to when you were growing up, can you hear in your own voice definitive influences on your vocal style?

"Absolutely. Obviously it is brought to my awareness when someone else will tell me, but it really comes down to  eveything you digest influencing what comes out. People can say that you have a unique or distinctive voice, but it's all characterized and informed by the things that you consume. What music you listen to, what movies you watch, all of those sorts of things will become ingrained in your being and everything that comes out will be the result of how your senses convert into feelings and glue to those songs."

 I'm curious if there are any songs on Love Language that you're immensely proud of, personally?

"Cathartically, I'm immensely proud of 'Hide & Seek'.  'Hide & Seek' was a chance for me to really get everything that I went through as a kid and as a teen. Honestly, I didn't realise how satisfying it would be to actually verbalise those things. It's like going to therapy.  You keep these things bottled up. When when we finished writing that song, I was very emotional. As surface level listen, it is easy to get into it, it's a core song, but the more you dive into it, I'm articulating my  suffering in that period of my life. That's now gonna get projected into the world, and hopefully, somebody stumbles upon it and hears it at the right time and in the right place. And it means enough that, you know, it'll just cushion the fall a little bit and make them appreciate life as it is because things do get better."

Outside of music is there anything else you feel you're a Maniac for?

"A maniac like a rebel? Yeah. Oh, God, I don't even know how to answer that question. I'm a Virgo. So I'm a pretty like controlled mind. A lot of my chaotic times are past me I feel.  I can be a little bit of a goblin on tour though, if that blunt comes out it's on. I know how the night is going to end and it's going to end in me sitting in a trolley and somebody pushing me down the street"

What else do you love in this world?

"Honestly, just meeting people and having new experiences. Like I said in with in terms of  art in itself like the creative vs the consumer, internal vs external, like that balance, I wouldn't be able to love myself if I wasn't like energized by the people around me. So just keeping like a tight circle and a good like solid foundation of people that are not necessarily like minded but people that have the right intentions and, you know, push me to be myself and you know, push me to make necessary changes. That's really what is important to me in my life.

If you could have one song play every time you enter a room like you're a pro-wrester, what song would you want it to be?

"Dude, I'm not even joking. 'Hero' by Chad Kroeger. I just walk in just like fucking strutting, wind blowing.  Nobody can not feel good, after listening to that song."

Please make that a Windwaker cover, I need to hear this! 

We'll have to do it for 'Like A Version'.

Windwaker does Nickelback on triple j, you read it here first, Maniacs. Now you're about to head out on tour with I Prevail and Motionless In White are you excited about being on that tour?

"I am absolutely stoked to be on that tour. I think the last venue we played was a 400 cap or something, so to jump straight into a full run of these like bucketlist venues. That in itself is like mind boggling, like we've already achieved just a plethora of things that we just never thought we would achieve. So everything from here is just you know, a gift and we're really looking forward to that tour and just vibing with them."

miw tour
Tickets for all shows are on sale now via Destroy All Lines.

Windwaker are also touring Australia in November in support of Enter Shikari and Creeper

ww ll

Listen To Love Language

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Interview - Speaking 'Love Language' With Will King Of Windwaker

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