Read up on the Wild Reeds, and you’ll find writers describing the Los Angeles band with any number of hyphenated genre mashups that include “folk” and “country.” Which is kind of weird, because those aren’t the first words that come to mind when listening to the band’s new album, The World We Built.
It’s a rock-solid collection of confident, well-crafted pop songs that are sometimes delicate, sometimes elegant, and sometimes heavy, but not heavy like metal. Heavy like substantive. These songs feel dense and deeply rooted, as if they’ve been around for decades.
“People hear with their eyes first. We are not a country band,” says Kinsey Lee, one of the Wild Reeds’ three lead vocalists. “We used to have a banjo, and people would quickly assume that we were gonna bust out a ‘Wagon Wheel’ cover or something.”