Louisville rockers Wombo just released their third LP, “Danger in Fives,” today through Fire Talk records. The album takes a slightly darker and eerier approach than their previous releases to create an experience that I’d describe as walking through a dream carnival and coming across various shadowy, intangible figures as you go. 

Wailing guitar riffs, droning basslines and ethereal vocals come together to create something not quite nightmarish, but definitely surreal. 

Last month, I talked with singer/bassist Sydney Chadwick a little about the band, dreams, and the new release.

Wombo is a band born out of the high school friendship between Chadwick and guitarist Cameron Lowe. “We kind of shared music with each other in class and decided we kind of wanted to play music together. I would show him things that I was writing on guitar and then we found a mutual love for the Strokes and we were just like ‘let’s start a band,’” says Chadwick.

Eventually, the duo got to know Joel Taylor, the drummer for Wombo, and started jamming together. “It just kind of naturally occurred. Songs were just coming together and we decided to make it a real thing and have a show. That was probably back in 2016, 2017.”

Fast forward to 2025, Wombo now has three LP releases and several EPs/singles under their belt. With “Danger in Fives,” the band wanted to try something new.  “The other albums I feel like there’s always been we just write it together in the basement at Joel’s house and usually it’s me on the bass making up some baseline and a melody sort of naturally comes through and then Joel kind of taps into it and Cameron then will lay his guitar on top of that as another melody,” says Chadwick. “There’s a lot of that on this new album also but what was different about this one was that we just weren’t satisfied with that writing process after having done it for so long, we wanted to shake ourselves out of the habit and the routine of it to see if we could come up with just something a little more…like we wanted to grow and challenge ourselves.”  

This led the band to experiment a bit with how they structured their songs and sound.  “Sometimes the way I respond to just the loud drums and everything, it shapes the way I form the melodies and the way I play the bass. So we were like, let’s just be a little bit more sensitive with some of the songs so that’s kind of the approach that we took. So it was kind of half and half but still the same old Wombo in the basement like coming up with songs together too,” says Chadwick. 

As an album, Danger in Fives features heavy cyclical sound and imagery. Back in May, Wombo released their lead single/title track along with a music video that shows Chadwick continuously waking up from a dream.  

She describes the song as about being stuck in loops and attempting to get out of that by doing something mundane. “I like to go to thrift stores a lot and just look at stuff and just have my mind off things. So the video we wanted to not explicitly be literally about that, but kind of about just being stuck in loops and cycles,” she says. 

When creating the video, Chadwick and Lowe wanted to capture the subtlety of being in a kind of dream state, where everything is slightly off. “We didn’t want to be like, ‘Whoa, there’s a floating table in the room all of a sudden,’” says Chadwick. 

Dreams are an important aspect in Chadwick’s creative process. She dreams vividly and finds a lot of her imagery pulling from her dreams and subconscious. “I think it can create these beautiful landscapes where I can kind of play with the metaphorical aspect of them and relate them to my everyday life and help me kind of deal with things that I may not have even known that I’m dealing with,” she says. “I think that I lived in a very chaotic, tumultuous household and it made me a quiet child… so I turned into this inner world of images and dreams and I would make up stories and things so all of that’s very important to me.”

Wombo also released two other music videos for their singles “Neon Bog” and “S.T Tilted” that follow the same theme as the one for “Danger in Fives” where things aren’t quite right. Watching all three, there’s a definite throughline of narrative and visual elements that indicate they come from the same dreamscape. It feels like there’s a story hidden within the album. 

During the creation of “Danger in Fives,” Chadwick was revisiting some of the music that made her realize “Oh you can write music like this.” She talks about finding a copy of Gorillaz’s “Demon Days” on CD and realizing she hadn’t listened to it in forever. “That was kind of like the soundtrack for my whole entire fall and winter leading up to releasing this album. I really was kind of also regressing a little bit. I was listening to a lot of stuff I listened to in high school like Animal Collective and Of Montreal and I was like, ‘God, this is so fun,’” she says. “I grew up with parents who weren’t very explorative in their musical taste. They’d just listen to classic rock or stuff like that, like mainstream shit, so when I first started listening to bands like.. I don’t know… like Pylon and stuff I was like this is crazy that people write music like this. It was mindblowing. So I kind of went back to all of that I would say.”

Even though “Danger in Fives” is complete, Wombo doesn’t plan on stopping. “I think the funnest part is pulling everything together and getting it made and done. So now that it’s [out] we’re already like let’s write more songs. Let’s start writing again and not get rusty, and just keep it going,” says Chadwick.

“Danger in Fives” sees Wombo doing a new take on their established sound. It’s purposefully disjointed and at times unsettling in the best way possible. It’s a vivid dreamworld that truly envelops you.