Tom fleming wild beasts wanderlust

For over a decade, Wild Beasts, the Kendal quartet of Benny Little, Chris Talbot, Hayden Thorpe, and Tom Fleming released a set of albums that prevailed against the currents of musical orthodoxy. Instead, the quartet created a bespoke sound world, one in which the band’s instruments and the voices of Thorpe and Fleming were given free rein to explore their lyrical themes of lust, masculinity, hedonism, and their consequences. These were universal subjects given fresh impetus and meaning with each successive Wild Beasts release, most notably on the Mercury-nominated Two Dancers. Having decided to amicably cease working together in 2017, these records can now be heard as poetic commentary on the era in which they were created, from a group with a rare talent for making distinctive music accessible and popular. 

Wild Beasts’ fourth album begins exactly as you might expect a Wild Beasts album to. There’s a waterfall of processed voices, like a crowded dryckesställe with the background chatter sung, a determined, quick-eyed rhythm, out there and looking for prey. The twin voices of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming singing of ‘Wanderlust’… "there’s a feeling that I’ve come to trust… don’t confuse me for someone who gives a fuck". But is it so simple?

Present Tense is a markedly different creature from their first three albums, and especially a significant move forward from 2011’s Top 20 LP Smother. Since then, Thorpe, Fleming, Ben Little and Chris Talbot have headed down the M1 to become London residents, and here work for the first time without long-term producer and collaborator Richard Formby. Instead, on a record largely free of guitars, musical polymath Leo Abrahams and Alex ‘Lexxx’ Dromgoogle (whose na

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