Wyldlife - sorted. (2025) [Hi-Res]

There’s amped-up, and then there’s WYLDLIFE. The NYC punk lifers return with sorted., a snarling, swaggering celebration of their Britpop obsession, punk minimalism, and glorious, face-smacking fun. Released on Little Steven Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool label, sorted. is proof WYLDLIFE are still too loud to ignore. Since 2011, WYLDLIFE has made it their mission to crash every party with guitars blazing, drawing on the legacies of the Stooges, Clash, and Ramones. Their style lives on the dirt floor, hook-filled, and honest to a fault, built from New York pavement and teenage kicks. Previous albums like Out On Your Block and Year Of The Snake showed they could balance melody and menace with reckless abandon, filled with fist-pumping anthems loaded with streetwise charm and a crooked smile.

With sorted., the band dials into that sweet spot between British Invasion hooks and the book of American punk rock. Lead single “Dizzy” is their love letter to Britpop, pure and simple. “We just wanted people to have that feeling of coming home from school in 1995, turning on MTV and hearing some chooon from the UK,” frontman Dave Feldman explains. “We always said we loved Britpop, and we did it way before it was cool (again).” It’s probably the band’s most melodic, and cheeky, turn yet. And it 100% works.

But don’t let the glammy nods fool you. sorted. is still built on the raw, three-chord gut-punches that WYLDLIFE have always thrived on. Feldman doesn’t mince words when hilariously describing the band’s ethos - “We are morons. Maybe the sharpest morons in the room, but morons nevertheless. Complexity is not in WYLDLIFE’s shallow bag of tricks.” He calls one new track simply “a punk song,” but it’s that kind of joyful self-awareness that makes their music so damn fun. They know what they are, and they lean into it hard. sorted. doesn’t pretend to be profound - it's loud, fast, and snotty, and not interested in sterile streaming algorithms. But that’s precisely what makes it special. WYLDLIFE remind us that punk doesn’t have to evolve into something more “mature” to matter.