Wardell Announces Second Full-Length Album

Wardell, the brother-sister duo of Theo and Sasha Spielberg, have announced the release of their second full-length album, Impossible Falcon, out September 20. Additionally, they have released the first single from the album, "I'm A Man," via Rolling Stone.

"This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album but also one of the last songs to be recorded," Theo Spielberg tells Rolling Stone. "So while the song's sentiment informed the rest of the album, it took recording most of the rest of the album in order to zero in on the sonics and the vibe of this song. It's very self-reflexive in that way. This album was written while we were both questioning our individual relationships, realizing we were outgrowing old patterns and partners. Little did we realize that our band was actually going through similar motions."

The children of filmmaker Steven Spielberg and actress Kate Capshaw, Wardell first began as a duo titled Brother/Sister, writing and recording music since they were young and first playing shows in 2010. They released their debut album, Love/Idleness, in 2015, two years after their first EP Brother/Sister. Love/Idleness, recorded primarily in the duo's childhood home, was created just prior to Theo moving to New York to book music for Saturday Night Live while Sasha continued to work in Los Angeles, collaborating with other musicians such as Nicolas Jaar.

In the fall of 2016 they entered the studio with Chris Coady and a handful of songs and spent over a month recording what would be the foundations of Impossible Falcon. However, they still felt something was missing, and they had more songs they wanted to record. In 2017 Sasha began her solo project, Buzzy Lee, while Theo began work as the director of programming for the then-new Public Arts in New York City. Things finally snapped into place in April of 2018 when Theo ran into childhood friend Adam Gunther at The Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles. "I basically asked Adam if he wanted to produce this new album, that we wanted to keep it tight and close to home, that we wanted the comfort of friends."

Over the course of the next few months, several dinners and emails later, they set-up the sessions that were to complete the album. They started with a song that they'd written right before going into the studio with Chris, "Domestic Sweater." "It ended up being perfect because by the time we went into the studio with Adam we had looked at these songs from so many different angles, demoed and re-demoed them, we were pretty intimately familiar with them."

"We tracked 'Domestic Sweater' live as a full band. It had been a while since we had even performed so in doing so, a sweet innocence arose, as though we were playing in our garage again" says Sasha.

Sasha continues, "During our sessions with Chris, I was going through the death of my "step-dog," Poncho. We lit a candle for Poncho and continued the record. In our sessions with Adam, I was going through a breakup with "Poncho's dad." Both Chris and Adam shared our sense of humor, so while there was a heaviness to tracking around that time, we were constantly laughing."

It was in this spirit that Wardell finished the album. Both Theo and Sasha were going through breakups, the band was being pushed towards different coasts, yet they both found the beauty in building something new with the understanding that things fall apart.

Photo credit: Julia Brokaw

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