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Genre:

Rock

Label:

Winspear

Release Date:

2026

In a recent survey of the state of twee music, Mason Mann, a member of Josephine’s Next Million Miles—a newer act that owes a lot to the homespun indie pop of the ’80s and ’90s—surmised that the core of the genre was not joy, but pain. “For almost all classic twee like the Field Mice or Beat Happening,” Mann said, “the foundational element is a deep depression.”

Though the Indianapolis quintet Wishy once claimed to make “optimistic” music, the handful of releases they’ve put out since they began working together in 2023 place them squarely in the tradition of the twee bands they love. Their vision of guitar-led indie pop—which has darted from sun-warped C86-isms to swooning power-pop refractions to delicate shoegaze wisps to the shimmering sounds of turn-of-the-’00s radio rock—may sound giddy, but a deep, bruised longing aches at the core of their best songs, a breathless pining for a love that’s always just out of reach. They aren’t afraid to be downers; they aren’t afraid to seem a little desperate. The intensity of their yearning has only increased on their second album, Nature’s Pill—and that’s no easy feat, considering this is a band whose breakout track opens with the narrator prostrating himself before the object of his affection.

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On opener “All the Rage,” Krauter recounts the malaise and wasted days that follow a breakup. The loss sounds all-consuming; he’s sapped of purpose and perspective. “How many times will love swallow your life?” he wonders. But the track’s magic—and it is one of the band’s most immediately endearing—lies in its sugar-rush delivery. Even as they sing of not being able to pick their clothes up off the floor, Krauter and fellow vocalist-guitarist Nina Pitchkites never sound too bogged down by ennui, charging through downcast verses with smiles smeared across their faces. As their voices ping-pong off one another in straining harmony, the effect isn’t so much that they’re at peace with melancholy as that they’re delusionally powering through it. Each needling guitar lead serves as an exclamation point on their assurances that amid the turmoil, they’re totally doing fine!

A host of love songs are scattered across the record, but they’re no less frazzled or frayed. “Headscratcher” is a tale of desire set at last call, each foggy come-on encircled by a corkscrewing guitar riff, as if the song mirrored the spiraling thoughts of romantic obsession. “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” with its Auto-Tuned vocals and woozy drum programming, hints at a more purely pleasurable version of the band’s pop impulses. Still, the track eventually collides into a seasick wall of distortion that recalls lovesliescrushing’s weightless takes on shoegaze as Pitchkites sings of unmet expectations and self pity. Even “Lovesick”—a piece of nostalgic guitar pop that recalls the more fuzzed-out corners of the Sarah Records catalog—is thrown off balance by the spirit of its title. It’s not just a song about love, but about the way desire can be an affliction.

For all the complicated feelings they express throughout the record, Wishy rarely let off the gas on Nature’s Pill. They charge headlong into the fray, which is of course one way of dealing with gloomier emotions. On the record’s closing track, “Party World,” they lay out the approach as clearly as they can. “One day, I was walking around, briefly quite demoralized,” they sing. “So I took to the sky in a big jet plane and flew until the stars were lines.” Before long, the distortion kicks in, the song takes off, and the depression’s in the rearview, for a moment. These students of twee know a thing or two about evasive tactics: Maybe you can’t outrun depression, but it’s a lot harder to hit a moving target.

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