Wild Yaks - Great Admirer (2019) Hi Res

All ears on deck as one of the more disarming yet creative bands out there has new music on the horizon. Meet Martin Cartagena, Jose Aybar, Patsy Carroll, Giovanni Kincade and Rob Bryn who serve as the crooked backbone to one of Brooklyn’s most beloved rock bands – Wild Yaks.

The band returns with Great Admirer, a brand new LP from Ernest Jenning Record Co on June 21st. The Yaks maintain wild group vocals lead by Bryn’s sea-soaked romanticism, yet the sound is more expansive than past records. Produced by Matt Walsh (The Forms) at Oceanus in Rockaway, we see the Yaks employ a horn section, strings, flute and saxophone, without it ever taking away from the energy and immediacy of the songs anchored by the melodic bass and shuffling drums of Aybar and Cartagena and the rough poetry of Bryn.

Bryn has spent the last couple years since the last Wild Yaks spending summers in Rockaway Beach, later reimagining failed romances into fairy-tale love stories.

“Four wonderful women I couldn’t talk or dance or sing or kiss into a summer romance. It hurt so bad! I’m a 42-year-old man. The world is burning. This is all I can think about? This is what the songs are mostly about,” says Bryn.”

Of course, the worldwide trials and tribulations go even deeper as since the last Yaks record, Bryn sailed on boats to the Caribbean a couple times as he self-described “Facing the void and getting some brutal self-knowledge about what kind of man I am. Not as tough as I’d like!”

Bryn was living on a boat in Rockaway and the boat next to him caught on fire and he lost everything he owned, guitars and bicycles and camping gear and everything, and the $7000 in cash he had saved all summer bartending on the boardwalk five days a week.

“I thought the people on the boat where the fire started had melted to death and wouldn’t know till the next day they were alive,” says Bryn. “I lived through that. That shit’s on the record too.”