It’s been a long time since Toronto’s Wild Rivers have been in Detroit to share their sad but catchy folk sounds. Their previous scheduled concert at the Shelter in 2020 was canceled due to the pandemic.
“I tried to look this up because it had been a long time. I think it’s 2017, which is kind of crazy,” Wild Rivers guitarist Andrew Oliver told me on the last time his band was in the Motor City.
“That’s scary,” chimed in Oliver’s bandmate and vocalist Devan Glover.
“Ignored our little Detroit neighbors but we’re back with a vengeance,” declared Khalid Yassein, the other voice of Wild Rivers music. The eight-year drought would finally come to an end later that night when the trio took the stage at the Majestic Theatre.
Listen: Wild Rivers reflect on a decade of being a band
Wild Rivers had an ambitious 2024, releasing two albums in a span of three months — Never Better in July and Better Now in October. Both albums were recorded during the same session with producer Gabe Wax (Soccer Mommy, Beirut, Palehound) in Joshua Tree, Calif. The band realized early on they had too many songs for one record, so the decision was made to release the Better tracks as a duology.
“We wanted the albums to kind of reflect the time of year that they were released, and they were kind of like mirror images of each other,” Glover explained. “But one was slightly more positive and one was slightly more in its feels — and so tonally we tried to kind of design each track list to be a similar but different kind of parallel version of the other record.”
The origins of Wild Rivers can be traced back to Glover and Yassein meeting as university students and playing shows together. They would later be joined by Oliver and original drummer Ben Labenski in 2015, with this lineup releasing their self-titled debut album in 2016. From the twangy vibes of “Speak Too Soon” and “Heart Attack” to the anthemic “Wandering Child,” Wild Rivers the album proved to be a promising start for Wild Rivers the band.
“We’ve never skipped a step. We’ve played every size of venue.” – Devan Glover, Wild Rivers
In 2020, Wild Rivers would get a boost from the soulful ballad “Thinking ‘Bout Love” off their Songs to Break Up To EP. It has over 174 million streams on Spotify and the music video has over one million views on YouTube as of this writing.
Editor’s note: I highly recommend you listen to the acoustic version of “Thinking ‘Bout Love” that Wild Rivers released in the summer of 2020.
After four albums, two EPs, opening for The Chicks and Noah Kahan, two JUNO Award nominations and sold-out headlining tours, are Wild Rivers where they thought they’d be when this journey started a decade ago?
“We hope so, but it’s been a long, kind of slow trajectory — which, looking back, we’re really grateful for it,” said Glover. “We always say we’ve never skipped a step. We’ve played every size of venue, we’ve managed ourselves. Then we…slowly built a team around us and have always been very involved in every part of the process.
“And for so long, we were just winging it, but we had this kind of ridiculous and unwavering belief in ourselves, and we kind of always manifested this kind of situation — and continue to manifest lots of other cool opportunities that…are bucket list items, but it’s been really amazing to start to check those off. We have to stop and really reflect and be grateful because I think it can be easy to continue to push forward and then not realize how much you’ve accomplished. It’s conversations like these that kind of allow us to be like, ‘Whoa, we have done a lot of stuff.'”
Wild Rivers are currently enjoying a well-deserved break but will hit the road again supporting The Head and the Heart in July and making the festival rounds after that — including their Lollapalooza debut on Aug. 3 and Austin City Limits in October. See their full itinerary at wildriversmusic.com.
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