How Wunderhorse’s Jacob Slater Found His Voice and Made an Indie-Rock Breakthrough

It’s peculiar to hear Jacob Slater talk so effusively about “the quiet life” when he is renowned for one of the most intense, rib-shakingly loud live sets on the indie circuit. He’s the sort of artist, it seems, who is striving to find meaning in life’s simpler moments.

“I haven’t had a break in a long while,” he says, eyes narrowing as he lights a cigarette. The smoke plumes drift towards a large Bob Dylan poster spread across the ceiling. “The sea is cold and there’s been waves here the past few days, so it’s been good to get back out there. I’m a little bit rusty, though, as I now spend so much time out of the water.”

The Wunderhorse frontman has been readjusting to the natural rhythms of life in his adopted locale of Newquay, Cornwall. It’s here where the 27-year-old trained as a surf instructor a few years ago, a solo venture that helped to relight his creative fire after burning bright and crashing out in the much-hyped but short-lived London punk band Dead Pretties. Recently, he has spent his time sleeping in, listening to records, and catching up with friends over coffee. Best of all, Slater says in a blissed-out tone, there is little to no mobile phone signal. The temptation to go off-grid clearly looms large.

Returning to the coast has become an outlet for Slater’s newfound sense of lightness. Rarely at home, he’s spent much of 2024 insulated inside a touring bubble, playing shows across Europe with Fontaines D.C. and racking up huge British festival appearances at the likes of Reading & Leeds and TRNSMT. In August, Wunderhorse’s second LP, Midas (Communion Records), hit No.6 on the Official U.K. Charts upon release; a major feat, given that 2022 debut Cub failed to crack the Top 40.

On his birthday, Slater got a call from his manager saying they had booked a gig at London’s 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace next spring. In November, the group supported Fontaines D.C. throughout Europe, and now, through December, the band are opening for Sam Fender at arenas across the U.K. and Ireland, capping off an extraordinary year.

Though often mired in themes of self-destruction and volatility, the music of Wunderhorse is uplifting, cathartic, and compassionate. The four-piece are cult stars at the threshold of mainstream crossover, a reality that they are now encountering on the road. Each night, they come eye-to -eye with a predominantly young fanbase that has recently ballooned in size as a result of “unexpected” TikTok popularity. “Not to sound like an old man, but I really don’t know how that whole ‘online thing’ works. Yet it seems to be a real beast,” says Slater, speaking over video call.

It was after a headline show at Glasgow’s Barrowlands venue last month that Slater realized the band’s profile was changing. Combating a disrupted sleep schedule that had left him feeling like “a nocturnal creature,” he ventured out, alone, to walk off all the adrenaline he had worked up on stage. What he found was a city gradually revealing itself through characterful people, foggy images of bars shuttering up for the night, and the distant expanse of the M8 motorway. 

Only an hour earlier, with sweat beads lining his forehead, he had been growling into the mic, stomping as each song reached its soaring climax. Video footage of the performance circulated on social media the following day, with clips of gig-goers crying and barking doing the rounds. Wunderhorse may have already inspired fan tattoos and custom trainers, but this felt like a new level of visibility altogether.

“Recently, the audience has solidified a bit more in its demographic,” Slater explains. “At first, I didn’t quite know how to take it when people were telling us that we had young fans. But I remember when I was younger, music meant so much to me. It still does, of course, but music has a particular potency when you’re a teenager. If people are connecting with us at that age, then that’s amazing.”

Initially a one-man endeavour, the first seismic shift in Wunderhorse’s trajectory took place when Slater decided to expand the project to a full band in the early days of creating Midas. He brought Harry Tristan Fowler (guitar), Peter Woodin (bass) and Jamie Staples (drums) into the fold, having met each of them at gigs in London and their native Hertfordshire. Slater figured out early that the best way to approach music was to build his own world and invite people in; he and his bandmates soon honed their bluesy, expansive, emotionally-weathered sound after bonding over seminal records from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.

The release of Cub, meanwhile, had left Slater feeling as though he was treading water as a lyricist. Much of the album’s writing resonated because of its unvarnished frankness about a dark personal history, traversing selfishness (“Purple”), nihilism, and traumatic teenage experiences (“Butterflies,” “Teal”). For its author, however – who was in recovery from addiction issues at the time – having to accept the circumstances of his previous life for what they were became too much of a mental burden to bear.

“This is probably not the stuff you’re meant to say in interviews, but I think every artist has songs they wrote when they were younger and now struggle with,” Slater says, grinning beneath a big, raggedy scarf. “You start to realize that, whatever you write, you’re going to have to live with it for a long time. If people are singing songs back to you and you don’t like the words that you’ve written, then you end up standing on stage feeling like you’ve deceived yourself.”

Slater notes how his record contract stated that Cub was meant to see him “deliver 18 songs at a minimum.” Only 11 tracks made the final cut, and he put “any leftovers that didn’t fit into the Wunderhorse world” onto 2023 solo LP Pinky, I Love You. Curiously, eagle-eyed fans noticed that, a few weeks back, the earliest Wunderhorse music videos had been removed from YouTube; they responded by creating a Google Drive folder with all the newly missing clips. Today, Slater admits this was his doing: “If I had it my way, there would be no promo, there’d be no videos. I find it all really difficult because it’s not the way that my brain works.” 

Releasing Midas didn’t banish Slater’s feelings of alienation towards the music industry entirely, but it did explore a more peaceful coexistence within it. It seems as though the search for salvation he sings of on “Silver” is starting to bear fruit. Despite it all, Slater thinks that aspects of his life today would astound his younger self: he is thoughtful yet steadfast in describing how publications describing Wunderhorse as “generational,” only two albums in, can be disorienting for a musician still coming to terms with his changing stature. 

“Worrying whether you’re going to become this ‘grand thing’ that people are saying you are will only cause you to get in the way of yourself. Nobody even knows what such titles mean,” he says. “Any songwriter who has stood the test of time has managed to stay true to who they are. Like, did Bob Dylan wake up one day and go, ‘I’m gonna be generational?’ No.”

It’s clear that Slater sees a gap between his intentions and the public’s reaction to his musical output. He’ll later mention how Midas’ “Superman” was “completely misunderstood” by listeners, but he’s also trying to let go of these things which are out of his control. “Nobody’s ever going to feel what you felt when you wrote the song as everyone is at the center of their own universe,” he says. “And that’s part of the magic.” True self-acceptance: Slater is steadily getting there, inch-by-inch, wave-by-wave, song-by-song.

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