INTERVIEW: Connor Talks with Toli and Kery of Wildways [2016]

In the event that you slept on it, earlier this year, Sarah Where is My Tea rebranded themselves as Wildways before releasing an epic, nearly hour-long piece of post-hardcore and metalcore mastery. We had the chance to sit down with a couple members of the band and talk about it, their plans for the future, and some other odds’n’ends!

First off, thank you for taking a second to sit down and answer some questions about your new album—and congratulations, by the way, on a job well done! Can you do our readers a favor and introduce yourself/selves?

TOLI – Hey dude, nice to meet you too. Thanks for all your questions; I really enjoy the answering process.

My name is Toli and I sing in the amazing band Wildways.

KERY – Thanks so much. It’s a big deal for us. My name is Kery, I drum for Wildways.

Into the Wild is an incredibly diverse record. What were some of your biggest influences?

TOLI – I don’t know about the biggest influence, we are just a 5-piece member band and each of us really love different styles of music. So that’s why we made this record so different and I think we did a good job.

KERY – Yes you are right. Into the Wild turned out really incredible. One of the biggest influences is a change inside us. We become older and changed our point of view about music.

What made you choose “Faka Faka Yeah” for the lead single? Most listeners will probably agree, it’s a very different song from a majority of the release?

TOLI – Yeah it’s really different but we wanted to make people talk about us. I asked our label and they said, “Yes we gotta do it first”.

KERY – We don’t think that this song is special. We just wanted to make some discussion.

Into the Wild is a pretty long record: were there any times you thought it might be too long? Or on the flip side, were there any songs that didn’t make the cut?

TOLI – Man, we would like to record way more actually, cause we had a 30 songs nominated on Into The Wild, and It was really hard to chose 12 for recording. The reason why we finished only 12 is money hahaha.

KERY – I don’t think the album is too long. All songs were specially chosen for listening in one breath. Of course there are a few tracks that we have not included in the album just because they don’t have a place in it

What are your personal favorites from the record? You’ve got twelve full tracks there, but surely you like some more than others, right?

TOLI – 1st of all this is SKINS – for me this is the most honest song on the album. So epic.

2nd one – SIRENS, here’s a song about my ex-girlfriend and how it was hard to finished that, I still miss her actually man.

3rd – PRINCESS – because the beautiful and amazing Rebecca Need-Menear did guest vocals there, she’s a real princess.

KERY – Surely I have some favorites. For me it’s “Don’t Give Up Your Guns”, “D.O.I.T”, and “3 Seconds To Go”.

For those who didn’t know, Wildways was born out of Sarah Where Is My Tea—what prompted the name change? What sort of message or feeling do you want listeners to take away from the new name?

TOLI – We actually thought about band name changing a lot. Every time we felt like it was pretty unserious and a lot of people told us about that once we made a decision. We miss our old name but we think we chose the right one. We had like 4000 people unsubscribed from us in our Russian social media, a lot of people really hated us because they really loved our old name.

KERY – We liked our old name of the band, but we must go forward and make new music and all of this is a new chapter – “Wildways”. About the message of the new name, we just wanted to give a chance for our listeners to feel themselves into the wild.

What does the rest of 2016 hold for Wildways? Any plans for tours or more music?

TOLI – Yeah, we will release new music video coming really soon. We have any tour plans for Europe and Russia this MAY-JUNE, and right now we’re working on tour dates in US. Hope we will figured it out soon!

KERY – We have big plans for this year. First of all we go on Europe and Russia tour in May. At moment we’re trying to find major management to go on US and Europe tours.

Last question: if you could bring back ONE band that is broken up to play ONE sold-out show, who would you pick and where would you play it?

TOLI – Wow, that’s the most interesting question from all interviews I made last couple months thank you. Need some time to think… I would say “Suicide Silence” yeah I know that they’re still playing BUT, I mean that Suicide Silence with Mitch Lucker, cause this dude made myself and me like a vocalist. We really miss him and love him. RIP

Thanks so much! It was an honor to review the record and pick your brain for an interview!