To return to something you abandoned in your youth is a strange and humbling reckoning. You are not the same person who left. The world is not the same world. And yet here we are — older now, wiser – perhaps – in ways that matter, but still the same foolish dreamers at heart.
When I abandoned WU LYF the end of 2012 my heart had hardened. The fire had burnt out. The spirit of what had begun with the idealistic innocence of naive sincerity had come to feel like a pantomime. We had started with something real, something urgent, and somewhere along the way the form of it had swallowed the feeling.
In my autodidact pursuit of trying to comprehend the world we lived in, I found myself pulled under by black-pilled capitalist realism — the suffocating sense that the system was total, that resistance was aesthetic at best, delusion at worst. Another Four white boys playing rock and roll felt like self-indulgent irrelevance. So one fateful night I decided to sabotage everything we had built up together; Burn it all down.
However, try as I might, I could not escape a longing for what I had left behind — that raw collective catharsis, the howling of grief and the beauty that frequented those rooms we once filled together. The spirit of it, I have come to believe, was always larger than the band. It was passing through us. Fifteen years later, it passes through us still.
This great longing for a truer way of being has only intensified over the decade since we were last here. Soul loss is more pervasive across culture, the alienated hunger for authentic community more desperate. AI homogenisation, doom-scroll addiction, and the commodification of every human impulse has created a generation that longs for direct communion with Life itself — the natural intelligence that moves through all sentient beings.
Today the battle is not just against the techno-feudal gatekeepers, but against the way machines now think for us, feel for us, dream for us. I know deeply my own propensity to addiction, the intoxicating allurement of pseudo-eros as the little people gyrate upon my black mirrored screen. I am not writing from outside this. I am inside the belly of the beast, like all of us, trying to find the thread back to something Real.
Can we opt out? Jump into a LYF boat and sail away from this sinking ship? Can we change our course? For Nothing seems to change our minds — are we running out of time?
It is good for man to try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish, not to go down the dinosaur’s way until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him to know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles. — Robinson Jeffers
Jeffers words often steady me when the doom spiral gets too heavy. The yearning we feel is not a modern deviation — it is ancient, spiritual, and in this way we have always found our way through by participating in creation, by gathering together, by refusing the slow extinction of going along with what we are conditioned to accept as normal.
We are not the first to stand at the edge of time in a world that has lost its mind. We will not be the last. But we are here now. We the People & the People have the Power (!)
So we strive to create art that cuts through the machines trance — that gets people back in their bodies, out of their minds, fortified by the feeling that freedom shall thrive. The live encounter, the sonic vibration moving through flesh and bone, the collective breath in one room — this is our resistance to the virtualisation of human experience. Not content. Not product, but presence… Rock and Roll will never die, for it is the spirit of life.
At the end of the day, WU LYF is a band of outsiders; neurospicy wyrdos with perverse senses of humour and oblique strategies to find our way back home. We love what we do, and we do not fit into this dominant culture with its obsession over materiality & image – the self-branding salesmanship of the mass media — degrading, hollowing — is something we have never been able to do without feeling the life drain out of it.
We exist on the margins. And I know, because I meet and talk with you at shows, that there are so many out there who feel the way I do. The longing to feel at home in this world runs through all of us who never quite bought what was being sold.
I believe we are in the birth pangs of a new culture. A New Life is coming — if we want it. If we build it. Step out of the shadows and Seek our foolish destiny. Build it and they will come.
A Wave That Will Never Break is a record that could only have been made on the other side of everything that came between us. Everything was carried in — the silences, the years, the unfinished melodies, the seeds of something yet to fully bloom — and in that carrying, something alchemical happened. For in our commitment to simply be present with one another, joy erupted unbounded. Not in spite, but because of this spiralling path around our shared fate.
Triumph encapsulates all of this to me. Sitting with Tom, redrafting those lyrics together, with the desire to reconcile all that had passed between us — playing it again for the first time again with Evans and Joe brought tears suppressed for years, that I was not expecting and could not fight. Let it go, and let the waves break over you. That is the Triumph. Feeling the feeling in fullness. The breaking of old chains and the emergence of something that could not have existed without all that came before it.
I think we got somewhere real & true on the long, strange road to making this record. But still this just feels like a beginning, we are just getting started again- learning how to do this thing- together. WU LYF brings so much goodness into all our lives and I am thankful for the opportunity to be back here again working on making the dream real. To everyone who helped us get here — old friends, faithful strangers, all who never stopped believing in LYF — I am more grateful than I know how to say.
Ellery Roberts
TRIUMPH / A NEW LIFE IS COMING
10” VINYL LYF024
TRANSPARENT PICTURE DISK
PRE-ORDER 09.09.26
SIDE A
TRIUMPH
A NEW LIFE IS COMING
SIDE B
TRIUMPH (DEMO 2011)
A SPIRITUAL SONG
A WAVE THAT WILL NEVER BREAK
HEADLINE UK/EU TOUR
15/09 - DUBLIN - BUTTON FACTORY
17/09 - LONDON - ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL
18/09 - BRIGHTON - PATTERNS
20/09 - LE HAVRE - LE TETRIS
21/09 - LILLE - AERONEF
23/09 - COLOGNE - GEBAUDE 9
24/09 - BERLIN - LIDO
27/09 - OSLO - JOHN DEE
28/09 - STOCKHOLM - SOLD OUT
29/09 - COPENHAGEN - PUMPEHUSET
01/10 - PRAGUE - SUBZERO
03/10 - ZURICH - BOGEN F
04/10 - BOLOGNA - LOCOMOTIV
06/10 - LYON - L'EPICERIE MODERNE
07/10 - REIMS - CARTONNERIE (CLUB)
08/10 - ANTWERP - TRIX CLUB
10/10 - PARIS - TRIANON
11/10 - AMSTERDAM - TOLHUISTUIN
TRIUMPH
It’s the sound of your breath, your face, my first sight.
As the sun breaks the day, we survived the night.
I know you want to make something of this great longing called life.
Like your hearts drunk on kerosene and all you need is a light.
No one but you is gonna, gonna make it happen.
No one but you is gonna, gonna make life happen
You don’t have to live this life.
You know you aint got nothing but time.
Singing Don’t run away boy, don’t run away boy
Don’t run away boy, don’t run away boy don’t run away boy
1,2,3,4!
Feel the earth still turning / Feel the sun rise within
Hold your head up high / Lift your fists into the sky
You don’t have to live this life.
You know you aint got nothing but time
time to learn
It Took my brothers life to get us here
What once seemed so far was always near
Took me to greet death to lose all fear
Lose all fear
We jus PEO We the PLE
I will stand by you / if you stand by me
So Hold your head up high
Lift your fists into the sky
You don’t have to live this life
You know you aint got nothing but time
So do the things that, that you want to
Take the chance right, right before you
No matter what you what you been through
Life is still on your side.