Windwaker: What’s Your Love Language?

Building a band can be a lot like going to university. Getting together with your friends and finding your feet is freshers, whilst your first few gigs down the local is the second year. Writing songs and putting out EPs is your dissertation, and dropping your debut is graduation. After seven years of slogging it out across Australia, WINDWAKER are going global with their debut album Love Language.

“It’s pretty surreal, it’s been seven years but it’s happened in a blink of an eye,” exclaims vocalist Will King from the comfort of his home studio. “There hasn’t been a lot of time between each opportunity to process because new songs prompt new feelings, those feelings make new songs, and it just snowballs into more new opportunities.”

Every opportunity they’ve taken they’ve earned. And every move they’ve made has been strategically planned like moving a pawn in a game of chess. After years of self-releases, they finally signed to boyhood favourites Fearless Records. But they did it on their terms.

“Fearless approached us in 2019 after we dropped our Empire EP and we were like ‘holy shit, this is one of our favourite labels ever’, but we kind of ghosted them,” he laughs, looking back fondly on the journey. “We had nothing to show them that we felt was a step up, we were so paranoid that they had forgotten about us, but we spent a lot of time just sculpting the album and came to them with the whole project pretty much completed.”

If they were searching for a step up, they sure found it in Love Language. Crafting each song like an individual soundscape that’s interwoven into a multiverse of madness, they’ve twisted what heavy metal really means in the modern era. They’ve tie-dyed their metalcore in a rainbow of colours from stadium rock to synth-pop, via way of hardcore and trap.

Like building Frankenstein’s monster, how did they find fitting songs together for the album’s puzzle? “In terms of coherence, it’s a clusterfuck of an album,” Will roars, as bemused as he is proud of that fact. “We had to make sure that all these different components connected in a way that was seamless and made sense, but there’s so many different things going on so how can we do this maturely without it becoming a mess?”

Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, Love Language has benefited from the time they’ve had to work on it. Intended as a loose concept album, the track listing is carefully crafted to guide you all the way through, from the anthemic opener Beautiful to the tribal coffin-shutting drums of closer The Rain.

“Coming out of the pandemic, people are way more responsive to sensory overloads, because there’s so many things happening. In Beautiful, I’m pretty sure it’s like every 10 seconds and there’s new elements of ear candy, it’s all over the place,” Will explains, before diving deeper into it’s place and purpose in the grand scheme of things. “It’s the perfect way for us to start the album very systematically, very chaotically, and then the deeper it goes in, that’s when we can really slow the listener down and be like, there’s a whole life ahead of you, you don’t have to rush in and just absorb all these things quickly. You can take your time to appreciate things as they come and feel it at your own pace.”

Not only is Love Language designed to be enjoyed at your own pace, but it’s also made for you to experience your own main character moment. There’s a reason why everything’s a little ambiguous – WINDWAKER want you to worm your way into their world.

“I feel like it dilutes an album to be like ‘here’s everything about it’ and then the listener can’t connect with it as deeply as they’d like to because they might be going through something in their own lives. So, there’s a character in the story, but it’s put out in a way that if the listener digs the music, they can deep dive in as much as they want and connect it to their own experiences of love and fear.”

Listening to Love Language is like writing your own novel. It’s a choose your own adventure of interpretation. And whilst Will is reluctant to give anything away, he wears his heart on his sleeve on what inspired them to start down that rabbit hole. “We’ve been a band for seven years, so watching my peers grow, like the way we interpret love in ourselves and in others, we express so differently, we’re all different people. So, the album embodies our experiences of vicariously experiencing each other’s journeys.”

With great reflection comes great responsibility to write what comes out of it down. For Will, he found himself burdened by thoughts of adolescence, identity, belonging, nostalgia, mindfulness, and death. Whilst his bandmates – Jesse Crofts, Indey Salvestro and Chris Lalic – worked up the riffs, he worked up a sweat mentally.

“I had a lot that I needed to get off my chest. I’ve done some pretty fucking deep-end trips, where I had an ego death,” he reflects, quietly collecting his thoughts before adding, “I came back with all this information about how my empathy wasn’t as deep as it could have been. I wanted to lay it down to reinforce my feelings of where I think we’re all going as individuals, because it definitely made me realise how good these guys are, all of them as people are just so hard working and true to what this project means.”

WINDWAKER is less a band and more a brotherhood. Finding common ground through their different experiences of growing up in Australia, they’ve bonded together to tell the world their tales. And the evolution they’ve undergone between 2019’s Empire EP and Love Language wasn’t by chance, it was nurtured.

“I can tell just from the way we’ve changed personally that a lot of the dark material we expressed on Empire, we’ve not outgrown – because we’re still on a dualistic rollercoaster of up and down, of appreciating life and all that stuff – but that I can just feel way more elements of positivity. I don’t want to say enlightenment, because it’s cheesy, but it’s liberating, it just feels so good to feel good.”

If feeling good is feverish, then experiencing Love Language is infectious. Whilst the album digs in deep to dark days, it also celebrates the moments love pulls us through, empowering us to be better human beings. But as the band gets bigger, as they shift from struggling independents to label signees, and their sound transforms, the comments against them are coming thick and fast. But they’ve made their peace with that, it’s all part of the journey.

“Things will hit people emotionally differently, so I don’t really judge a comment. Obviously, it’s not very nice to project negative things into the world, but I don’t know what someone’s going through, so I won’t ever see a negative comment and say ‘fuck you’ because I’ve been through hard times, I’ve compared myself to other artists and had those bad times where everything just feels shit so that’s what comes out.”

“Honestly, if you like the music we make, then keep listening to it. If not, there’s so much music out there to enjoy, it’s really not an issue.”

Love Language is out now via Fearless Records.

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