NOX Meets: Dream Wife
2000 Trees Festival, 2018.
2020: the year that hit the pause button. Having rendered memories of gigs and sweaty crowds a distant memory overnight, it's easier than ever to put the music scene we miss on a pedestal and the staggering inequality in this summers festival lineups to the back of our minds. Dream Wife smashed that play button hard with latest release ‘So When You Gonna…’
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When I sat down with the Icelandic/London trio at a festival in 2018, a shift had begun in the music industry. Festivals and promoters were starting to be held accountable for the diversity (or lack thereof) in their lineups and a promise was made that by the year 2020 lineups would be 50/50. The stages finally reflecting the audience they perform to.
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That hasn’t happened of course, Wireless only had 3 female acts on their lineup and a mere 20 of the 92 acts booked for Reading & Leeds this year were female. TRNSMT organiser and gammon-in-chief Geoff Ellis also had the nerve to declare that the root of the issue is that women need to be “picking up guitars” and “playing in bands” in order to secure their place on festival line-ups…despite booking the blandest all-male headliners of all time.
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Although there’s a long way to go and a frankly exhausting conversation to continue, Dream Wife’s get-up-and-do-it attitude is leading the charge...
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How would you describe your sound to those who haven’t listened to you before?
Rakel: It’s kinda punk, but then it’s kinda pop, then it’s kinda rock?
Alice: We’re a guitar band, we’re a rock band, but then it’s also pop, you can dance to it.
Bella: It’s high-energy…danceable rock. Danceable rock with pop-punk elements…
Rakel: We’ve just said three words in various order haven’t we? We’re really pigeon-holing ourselves right now.
I’ve read that you met in art school and Dream Wife was formed as part of a project. Could you tell me a bit about that project and the influences behind it?
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Rakel: Well, our main influence was that we really wanted to go to Canada… Me and Bella were living together at uni and one night out we were talking about how much we wanted to go to Canada to visit our friends, but we didn’t want to travel without a purpose. They also live in various places across Canada, so we thought ‘how do we get there?’ So, we decided to start a band and tour Canada, and that’s how we would get around. Then we realised we needed more band members…
Alice: I got a message just saying ‘do you want to be in a band with me and Rakel and tour Canada?’ I said of course.
Rakel: The next day in uni I had to plan a gallery show and I didn’t know what to do. I was studying performance art at the time and thought that a band made with the sole purpose of just touring Canada, that sounds like performance art. We had our first show at the gallery in uni. The brief wasn’t to start a band or anything, but it fitted well. And gave me an A. After that we went to Canada for a month, went on a road trip and it was really great. A few months later were like ‘that was the best summer ever, what if we go see more places?’
Bella: Dream Wife is sort of an experiment in doing things, and believing that you can do things. Not judging yourself for not thinking too much about it, just going head-on into it. We were all in other bands at the time, all much more serious bands with a serious plan. Dream Wife never had any rules around it in the same way, and that’s the band that stuck. We challenged ourselves on our own terms, we just went with it and didn’t expect anything of it. We’ve always had so much fun with it and it’s a completely liberating thing to create in that way.
So as much as the story is that we started this band as part of a uni project, I think actually in a lot of ways Dream Wife created this alternative to what we were being taught at uni. We could set our own rules and it was something different. It’s good to challenge the things you’re being taught.
Having all studied art, do you think your visual eye for art influences your creative process?
Alice: They’re as one. As one in that the aesthetic considerations inform the sonic formulas. I think it’s really hard to separate that, the way we work and the way we have conversations about how we want to make things and what we want to make. It’s one conversation, just different facets of that same output. In a band, it’s a platform where there are so many possibilities to experiment, we’re stretching out within that model and seeing how much we can do. Trying to utilise all the possibilities.
What’s playing in the van at the moment?
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Rakel: A lot of ABBA. I need ABBA. It’s summertime, I’m just really feeling it.
Alice: I love that that’s our answer.
Bella: I mean I’ve actually been getting back into Nine Inch Nails in quite a big way, but I’d rather us just say ABBA.
With major festivals (finally) beginning to be held accountable for the diversity of their lineups, do you feel there’s a rise in womxn in punk at the moment?
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Bella: Maybe it’s more that it’s a rise in acknowledgement of female-identifying artists in the punk scene right now, or there are more opportunities for that voice to be heard.
Rakel: I just heard from Nova Twins that this is their first UK festival. That’s ridiculous. They’re incredible…why haven’t they been playing more festivals? Why haven’t they been booked for more festivals?
Bella: The set they just played - the whole tent was jumping up and down, they whipped the crowd into a frenzy. And for a set this early in the day at a festival that’s insane. Shout out to Nova Twins.
Rakel: I can see this festival (2000 Trees) is trying to acknowledge womxn on the lineup, unlike many others. But I still think there are a bunch of bands that have not had their share of the limelight yet.
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What do you think needs to happen in the music industry to achieve 50/50 by 2020?
Bella: It’s continuing these conversations and also men getting involved in these conversations too. Everyone has to make change together. You have to question the structure of gender together, and then I think change can definitely happen. But men have to call men out too. A shift definitely feels like its happening right now in some sense, but its about how we keep that up in terms of long-term change. You get spikes of movements and then they drop down and we forget about everything we’ve learnt in that moment.
Rakel: It’s an interesting time in music at the moment too because there’s so much gender fluidity going on in our communities, and the music coming through should represent what’s happening in the community. So I’m pretty excited to go back to a time where you’re exploring gender again, like Bowie, T-Rex and that era. Not just womxn in music but gender-fluidity too, start ripping into society.
Bella: We’re taking a band called Queen Zee on tour this year, and to be able to take a band like that who are on the same page as us in so many ways. It’s a really exciting time that we can tour the UK with a band like that.
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Support Dream Wife by pre-ordering 'So When You Gonna...' here, streaming their latest release title track 'So When You Gonna...' here, or keep up to date with 2021 tour dates here...
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By Hannah Nicholson-Tottle
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