Article Contributed by Calabro Music Media
Published on November 21, 2025
Today, Winged Wheel share “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home,” the second single to be released in advance of their forthcoming third studio album, Desert So Green, due January 9 on 12XU. A spectral psych gem, “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” is the closest Winged Wheel has ever come to straightforward melodic tuneage, while still remaining hazy and fragmented.
Comprised of Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Circuit des Yeux), Cory Plump (Spray Paint, co-owner of the dream venue Tubby’s), Matthew J. Rolin (solo guitar wizard and half of the Powers/Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack, and Fred Thomas (Idle Ray, Tyvek), Winged Wheel is a creatively and geographically scattered collective, with each player living in a different city and bringing their own unique element to the group’s interpersonal alchemy.
Early long-distance file trading between a few members yielded 2022’s debut album, No Island. As awareness and buzz grew around the band, they expanded their membership and met in person for the sessions that became 2024’s Big Hotel, a surgically assembled murk of high-energy kosmische rock with jammed-out tendencies. Fast forward, and the band that started out as a passing idea has completed multiple tours, become a taper’s dream with sets that drift through structure and improvisation, and ridden the momentum to places unforeseen on their third album, Desert So Green.
Following a run of shows across the Midwest in the spring of 2025, the group settled into a studio on the outskirts of Chicago to track. Though the full lineup had only been solidified for a little over a year at this point, time together on stage led to a quickly expanding sound and a unified vision. To this end, Winged Wheel spent hours refining flashes of inspiration into coherent songs. Leaning into deeper experimentation, the band uncovered new dimensions and contrasting atmospheres. The arrangements are dense with layers of synths, noisy disruptions, and glowing orbs of alien sound, but every shift is considered and intentional. It’s an album that teeters between excitement on one side and anxious tension on the other.
Indeed, Desert So Green represents yet another transformation for Winged Wheel, one that takes them into a space of sharpened dynamism and more nuanced expression. Things move a little slower, and the aftershock hits harder than the initial adrenaline rush. The energy that arrived all at once in loud explosions on earlier albums is refracted here, and ultimately all the more transcendent.
In January 2026, Winged Wheel will tour Europe for the first time, while North American tour dates will be announced shortly.
