On Monday, London-based pop duo Oh Wonder will be performing for Indian audiences for the first time since their formation in 2014. Singer-songwriters Anthony West and Josephine Vander Gucht will go live from their home in London and the concert can be streamed in India on the Instagram channel of Vh1 India, as part of their Quarantunes series of digital concerts, which started on March 25.
“We have been trying to perform in India for a number of years, but have been waiting for the right concert to make it super special,” the band told Scroll.in in an email interview. “We’re obviously super excited to follow it up with a real life concert once the world returns to normal.”
The Vh1 Quarantunes concerts, which have so far featured performances from India’s Naezy and Aditi Ramesh and international acts like The Aces, are among several initiatives to bring music to audiences through social media platforms.
For Gucht, who has studied post-colonial Indian literature in university and has some roots in India, the Monday concert will be sort of a homecoming. “My grandpa was born and raised in Bombay,” she said. “I still have a lot of family out in Mumbai, and have been very lucky to have visited a few times.”
Oh Wonder began its career on the music-sharing website Soundcloud on September 2014, describing themselves as a “writing duo, one song a month”. Staring that September, they released a single each month. The tunes were collectively released as part of their self-titled debut album in 2015. The idea of putting out a song each month was to “purely to give ourselves a deadline and an overarching goal,” the band said, which turned out to be a “great way to build a fanbase.”
Since then, Oh Wonder has toured across the globe and has released two more albums, Ultralife (2017), and No One Else Can Wear Your Crown in February.
With their first two records, West and Gucht did everything from songwriting to playing all instruments to mixing and producing. But for their last album, they brought in additional songwriters and producers. While their first album has a more acoustic, piano-driven sound and occasionally pensive lyrics, their subsequent work became peppier, as they evolved from being internet-only bedroom producers to a globetrotting band complete with a bassist and a drummer.
“Maybe we just got happier,” the band said about the upbeat tone their music took over time. “Touring the world was pretty amazing, and Ultralife tried to capture the energy we had playing live on stage with our band at festivals, hence why its a lot more upbeat and band-sounding. The first album’s rawness was probably due to the fact that we had no resources, no studio and no pressures. It just captured a time and a vibe.”
While Oh Wonder has surely grown musically, the band feels that they have also changed personally, which has influenced their work. “We both feel very strong and centred within ourselves, and have developed a lot of self-belief and self-worth over the years,” the band said. “That probably comes out musically in our willingness to experiment with our songwriting and production, and not make the same album twice.”
Their latest single, Lonely Star, released earlier this month, however, sonically evokes the melancholy of their first album. The piano-driven song has lines like “I guess I’ll be a somebody that nobody knows / Guess I’ll never find the one that I can call home.”
“We wrote this song as a response to what’s happening in the world right now,” the band said. “Everyone is feeling super lonely and wondering what everyone else is up to. It came out really quickly one night while we sat at our piano. We aren’t making a conscious effort to return to any sort of sound from before. Everything we make is a progression and an exploration, and hopefully considered as a standalone piece of music.”
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