Vertigo does not sound like Wand returning after five years away. It sounds like the band waking inside a room whose dimensions have changed. The walls are farther apart, the floor is moving slightly, and familiar instruments no longer behave as reliable objects. Guitars dissolve into vapor, drums appear to shift the ground rather than mark time, and Cory Hanson’s voice moves through the arrangements with the dazed calm of someone describing a disaster before deciding whether it actually happened. The album’s title is exact. These songs do not merely discuss uncertainty. They repeatedly remove the listener’s sense of balance.
Released by Drag City in July 2024, Vertigo is Wand’s sixth studio album and the first since 2019’s Laughing Matter. The lineup has contracted from the earlier five-piece into a quartet: Hanson, guitarist Robbie Cody, drummer Evan Burrows and bassist Evan Backer. Across eight tracks and roughly forty minutes, the group uses that reduced membership to make music that feels unusually large, filled with orchestration, open air and unstable perspective.
Wand began as a much more immediate proposition. The early records arrived quickly, loaded with distorted guitars, psychedelic color, garage-rock momentum and sudden shifts of style. By Plum and Laughing Matter, the band had become slower, more collaborative and less interested in treating each song as a vehicle for another enormous riff. Vertigo continues that movement, but it does not simply represent greater maturity or refinement. The band has not polished away its violence. It has learned how to conceal violence inside beautiful surfaces.
“Hangman” opens with the sensation that the song has already been playing somewhere beyond hearing. The drums arrive in a patient shuffle, guitars hover at the edges, and Hanson sings without establishing a secure center. The lyrics contain disappearance, exclusion and the possibility of seeing someone tomorrow, but they never settle into a story with a stable speaker or subject. The hangman could be an executioner, a child’s word game, a figure suspended between life and death or the person trying to complete an image from missing information.
The arrangement refuses to resolve the ambiguity. Instead of building toward a conventional rock climax, “Hangman” keeps altering the pressure around the same basic movement. Horns, strings and electric textures enter as changes in atmosphere rather than decorative additions. The song gradually becomes enormous without announcing that enlargement. Wand has always known how to make loud music, but here volume is less important than scale. The sound opens beneath the listener.
That difference defines Vertigo. Earlier Wand songs often generated excitement by colliding sections: a quiet passage would split apart, a riff would crush the arrangement, or the band would abruptly reveal another genre hidden behind the first. These songs are more continuous. Change occurs through accumulation, subtraction and shifts in focus. A melody that first appears central may become background. A guitar sound may begin as atmosphere and later reveal itself as rhythm. The music moves without always revealing which part is doing the moving.
“Curtain Call” continues directly from the suspended condition of “Hangman,” almost functioning as its afterimage. The title implies an ending, applause and performers returning after the drama is complete, yet the song feels more like a departure with no audience present. Its melodic fragments drift upward, while the rhythm keeps the body moving below. The division between physical and dreamlike sound becomes central to the album. Burrows’s drumming provides weight, but everything resting upon it appears capable of floating away.
Evan Backer’s bass is equally important. He does not merely support Hanson and Cody’s guitars. The bass frequently supplies the music’s gravitational center, giving the surrounding textures something to orbit. Without that low anchor, Vertigo might disappear into tasteful atmospheric rock. The rhythm section prevents the album’s beauty from becoming harmless. Even its gentlest passages contain the possibility of impact.
“Mistletoe” initially appears warmer and more domestic, but the title carries an old association with intimacy arranged beneath a poisonous plant. That combination suits Wand perfectly. The song extends an invitation while maintaining emotional distance. Its melody opens gracefully, yet details keep catching at the edges: distorted tones, rhythmic hesitation and vocals that seem to observe affection rather than trust it. The beauty is genuine, but it is not safe.
One of the most striking qualities of Hanson’s singing throughout the album is its restraint. He has often used his voice theatrically, moving between falsetto, rock declamation and a damaged croon. On Vertigo, he sounds partially removed from his own lyrics. That distance does not indicate indifference. It suggests shock. He sings as though emotion has become too large to express directly, forcing the voice to travel around it.
“JJ” is where the album’s loose methods become especially visible. Its opening is fragmented and slightly awkward, with pieces that do not immediately explain their relationship. Instead of disguising that uncertainty, Wand allows the song to search for its form in public. The second half gradually discovers a hypnotic pattern, and repetition begins connecting what initially seemed scattered. The pleasure comes from hearing coherence form rather than receiving it ready-made.
This is a risky approach. Vertigo occasionally lingers inside its atmosphere longer than the underlying material can support. Wand’s old records could be excessive, but they were rarely vague. Here the band sometimes mistakes suspension for depth, leaving a section hovering after its emotional point has already arrived. Yet even these moments belong to the album’s central experiment. A record about unstable perception should not always know exactly where it is going.
“Smile” provides the clearest light. It is the album’s most immediate song, built around a melody that could survive outside the surrounding fog. The guitars have the open sweep of 1970s radio rock, but Wand does not use that familiarity as simple nostalgia. The song sounds like a damaged transmission from a station found while driving through empty country. Its warmth reaches the listener through static.
The smile itself is similarly uncertain. It can indicate happiness, recognition, politeness, concealment or surrender. Hanson treats it as something both desired and mistrusted. The arrangement rises around that uncertainty, becoming radiant without pretending that radiance has solved anything. Vertigo repeatedly approaches revelation, then stops before naming what has been revealed.
“Lifeboat” makes the album’s imagery more direct. A lifeboat exists only because the larger structure has failed or may soon fail. It is rescue reduced to temporary capacity, a small object carrying people across an environment capable of swallowing them. Wand turns that image into music that feels simultaneously sheltered and exposed. The song offers movement, but not arrival.
Its position in the album is important. By this point, Vertigo has established a world of disappearances, poisoned intimacy, unstable identity and forced optimism. “Lifeboat” does not escape that world. It creates a vessel within it. The song’s steady motion resembles survival as routine rather than triumph: keep moving, keep the body above the surface, do not confuse continued existence with safety.
The band’s long break between studio albums gives this material additional weight. During those years, Hanson released solo records that allowed him to explore folk, country rock, progressive arrangements and a more traditional singer-songwriter role. Wand also issued the live album Spiders in the Rain, whose extended performances suggested that the group was becoming increasingly interested in improvisation and in songs as structures capable of being reopened. Vertigo brings those developments together without sounding like a Hanson solo album played by a louder band. It depends upon the quartet’s collective control of space.
“High Time” is the album’s fullest demonstration of that control. At seven minutes, it begins with a pulse that could be percussion, feedback or a machine attempting to imitate both. The song builds from the edges inward. Layers accumulate, the drums become more forceful, and the arrangement eventually rises into the kind of overwhelming passage Wand once would have delivered through a single enormous guitar riff. Here the effect is produced by multiple elements losing their individual outlines.
The climax is powerful because it is not clean. Strings, distortion, rhythm and voice press together until the song appears to exceed its own container. Then the structure recedes, leaving residue rather than a triumphant conclusion. The album’s loudest passage confirms what the quieter tracks have been suggesting: vertigo is not simple chaos. It is a conflict between the body’s sense of position and the movement reported by the surrounding world.
That conflict also shapes the production. Vertigo is carefully recorded, yet it avoids the sealed perfection of studio spectacle. Instruments bleed into one another. Distortion sometimes behaves as room tone. Orchestral arrangements do not sit politely behind the band but enter the same unsettled air as the guitars. The record sounds constructed and accidental at once.
The closing “Seaweed Head” returns the album to smaller dimensions without restoring stability. Seaweed moves according to forces it cannot control, appearing animated while remaining rooted or adrift beneath the surface. The title turns a human head into something aquatic, tangled and responsive to currents. It is a final image of identity losing its fixed outline.
The song ends without a grand statement because Vertigo has no interest in cure. The album does not treat disorientation as a temporary obstacle before clarity returns. It treats instability as the actual condition of living: relationships shift, groups change shape, bodies age, memories alter their subjects, and the ground continues moving beneath whatever structures have been built upon it.
This could have become a heavy-handed concept record, but Wand wisely leaves the connections loose. There is no announced narrative linking the hangman, curtain, mistletoe, lifeboat and seaweed head. These images work more like objects encountered during the same dream. Their meanings change according to proximity. Execution becomes performance, affection becomes poison, rescue becomes exposure and the human body becomes vegetation moved by an invisible tide.
The cover reflects this refusal of solid form. Its blurred, abstracted image suggests bodies or landscape without permitting either to become definite. Color has been dragged across the surface until recognition produces uncertainty rather than knowledge. The artwork does not illustrate the music. It prepares the eye for the same failure of orientation.
Vertigo is not Wand’s most immediately exciting album, and listeners looking for the volcanic fuzz of Ganglion Reef or Golem may initially hear absence where the earlier records supplied impact. The album requires attention to the spaces between events: the way a drum pattern changes the meaning of a drone, the moment a background texture moves forward, or the way Hanson’s melody remains steady while the arrangement tilts around him.
Its real achievement is that Wand no longer sounds like a band trying to contain every influence it loves. The older records often displayed their knowledge through abundance. Vertigo uses knowledge more quietly. Post-rock, progressive folk, orchestral pop, psychedelia and experimental studio music are present, but none become costumes worn for one track. They have been absorbed into the group’s method.
That absorption makes the record difficult to summarize and easy to underestimate. Nothing here has the obvious violence of an early Wand single, yet the entire album is organized around threat. Structures dissolve slowly. Beautiful arrangements conceal emotional collapse. Songs appear calm while removing the floor.
Vertigo is the sound of Wand replacing forward motion with unstable depth. The group has not returned to reclaim an old identity. It has returned to question whether that identity ever remained still. By the end, the listener is not knocked down by a riff or carried upward by a resolution. The room has simply tilted a few degrees, and everything inside it now occupies a different place.
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