Cub

Jacob Slater started Wunderhorse as a solo project after the dissolution of his previous band, punk trio Dead Pretties, in 2017. In that time, the biggest thing that he’s learned is that he revels in the intensity of hard work. “I think maybe when I was younger, I was like, ‘Oh, if you want to be creative, you’ve gotta lay around looking at the sky or some shit,’ but I’ve realised I definitely function best when there’s something to do,” Slater tells Apple Music. It’s an approach he’s applied to his debut album, Cub, which mixes wide-screen classic rock with reflective, country-tinged ballads. These songs capture the singer-songwriter doing his best to pick up the pieces after Dead Pretties and plot his next step, make sense of what’s been and move forward. “These songs come from quite a wide bracket of time,” says Slater. “Some of them are really old, and they’ve been bouncing around in my head for ages. I just wanted to get them out. It felt like the completion of an exorcism or something. A lot of it is analysing things that happened in my youth, which, at the time, I didn’t have the right tools to process.” In closing one chapter of Slater’s life, Cub opens up an intriguing path forward. Slater talks us through it, track by track. “Butterflies” “It’s got a fairly long instrumental intro, and I wanted the opening track to ease you into the world of Wunderhorse, rather than it being a super-immediate thing of like, ‘OK, here’s the first song—it’s a hit!’ I wanted it to be a slower process, a slower build. It’s about some strange premature sexual experience, so maybe a bit of an odd one to start the album off with, but my reasons were sonic and musical rather than lyrical. There’s a live album by Jeff Buckley called Mystery White Boy, and he was experimenting with much darker, grungier ideas on it. I was listening to that at the time of writing this song.” “Leader of the Pack” “I wrote this towards the end of Dead Pretties, but it never quite found its feet ther