Oh Wonder are back, and there’s quite a lot to unpack. The English alt-pop duo of Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West returned today (September 21) with a melancholic new single called “22 Break,” and it’s the title track to a surprise “break-up” album due October 8.
“We nearly broke up last year,” the band tweets. “It sounds dramatic, but it’s the truth. 22 Break, maybe the first break-up album in history written and recorded with the person you’re breaking up with. It’s awkward, it’s vulnerable, but it also saved us.”
Creating the record seemed to be quite the catharsis for the musical duo and real-life couple, who addressed the unspoken tensions through their songwriting, crafting the tracks rife with true feelings and brutal honestly that will color the myriad themes of 22 Break. With topics swirling around loneliness, inadequacy, resentment, and fears for the future, the process of music eventually helped bring them back together, as after the album was finished the pair traveled together in September of last year and cleared the air, fresh off experiencing the other’s feelings in the writing and recording process. With a happy ending in sight, Vander Gucht and West got married this past summer.
So this fifth album from Oh Wonder, the follow-up to 2020’s No One Else Can Wear Your Crown, is billed as a “new chapter” for the duo, despite the themes of it all coming crashing down. It should be a pretty intense listen, and detail a relationship journey that seems to have saved itself. In the end it’s a break-up album that didn’t lead to a break-up — of a relationship or musical project.
Listen to “22 Break” below, and stay tuned for the short film that will accompany the album’s release.
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