The Wants

Madison Velding-VanDam, Lydia Gammill, and Jason Gates formed The Wants in 2017. Following a period of trial-and-error and false starts with previous projects, Madison chose the simple name The Wants to speak to an earnest sense of yearning, as well as the freedom that comes with acknowledging superfluity.
The band synced in their passion for artful no wave, post-punk, and experimental electronic music, and a broader interest in art and performance that bridges mediums and genres. The early days of the project were busy and fragmented — Madison spent most of his time on the road with the band Bodega, and Lydia with her band Gustaf. The Wants worked diligently in the background, often in different time zones, stirring their own tastes and ambitions into the music. This method of working set the foundation for the band as an adversarial network of ideas.
The Wants finished an EP of six songs and played around NYC. After facing rejection from local labels, Council Records signed the band in 2019 and gave them freedom to work towards a record. The Wants scrapped half the EP and took the opportunity to push further towards their electronic aspirations with tracks like “The Motor.” In the spirit of the band’s name, the 2020 album Container was reaching toward something that wasn’t fully realized yet.
As Lydia began touring more extensively with Gustaf, The Wants transitioned to a rotating cast of local musicians and friends to fill out the band. After a string of sold out shows in the UK and EU, their Container tour was cut short by the Covid shutdown. Madison and Jason returned to the drawing board, looking forward to the next chapter of the project.
Yasmeen Night, of the project ‘NightNight,’ joined the band shortly after, first to support on their 2021 tour with Nation of Language and then permanently as a full-time member and writer on Bastard. Yasmeen’s classical training, encyclopedic love of dark, heavy music, and mastery of synth helped push The Wants into new territory, replacing much of the live bass with synth bass.
Bastard is, in part, a product of the tension baked into the band — three individuals with strong and often ruthless opinions, who are pushing and pulling the project in directions that don’t always immediately align. Where many bands might choose to break up is where The Wants start, welcoming the possibility that embracing friction can give rise to something cathartic and unexpected—if you have the stomach for it. Madison’s grounded songwriting pushes and pulls with Jason’s complex rhythms that combine analog drums and mutated electronics in live performance. Yasmeen surgically infuses vacant frequencies with an arsenal of dark, pulsing synth sounds and obliterates live basslines with pounding synth bass.
This record is the combination of a love of craft, the pursuit of challenging subject matter, and resisting stagnation. The Wants went into the studio with Peter Katis before the record was finished, knocking out all the tracking in five days. It was mixed by Jeremy Cimino and mastered by Ruairi O'Flaherty.
Five years after their debut record, much of the pressure and turmoil — personal, societal, and political — reflected in Container continues to unfold in Bastard. But the band is more observational than prescriptive, with an acerbic tone that suggests they aren’t quite serious but aren’t joking, either.
The artwork for Bastard is by Madison Carroll, who also did the artwork for Container and is considered a fourth and foundational member of the band. For Bastard, the artwork and music were produced simultaneously, influencing each other. In addition to the music, Carroll was inspired by a range of related materials — old memes, forensic photography, garbage, bad habits. Her first book of photography is being published this year by Pharmacy Books.