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Photo: Alister Mori 

Pete Wentz, of Fall Out Boy fame, has always had an eye for unusually cool talent—Panic! At The Disco and Gym Class Heroes are some names that immediately come to mind. So it makes sense that his latest diamond in the rough, Vienna Vienna, is just as interestingly different as the aforementioned stars. Wonderland, the debut EP from Vienna Vienna, puts the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist in vogue.

Launched by Wentz’s DCD2 label, Wonderland is packaged as “glimmer rock,” and the label fits as the sheen on the wrapper is palpable in the high-octane of distorted guitars that snake their way through the opening track “Vienna (Everything’s Fine).” As drum rolls torpedo listeners into stout choruses and catchy refrains, the energy builds to become infectious and rambunctious—like that of a teenage rebel coping with a changing world.

“Sex Drugs Whatever,” the second track of the EP, could easily be confined to a ‘00s pop-punk sprint, but if you look closer, it is much more modern than that and feels like a counterclockwise proposition to current trends. Perhaps because rapid-fire lyrics and 100 BPM bass plucks cloaked in emotional themes are so yesterday that they are now tomorrow’s popular music (again).

Perhaps this is why Wentz himself described Vienna Vienna’s music as follows, “Have you ever heard something that both felt so familiar and so alien all at once? That’s how I felt when I first heard a Vienna Vienna song. The lyricism feels adjacent to something our band would do but also completely new and odd in the best way.” It is a refreshing detour from what is on most playlists—as the second song ends, a sweet note is hit.

The record’s title song is a stroll across the mind of Vienna Vienna, a true child of the modern age, who sings “I fell in love with the world on the Internet / Closing the blinds so it’s easier to forget,” and other truisms of a society seemingly more dangerous and difficult to assimilate to than ever before. That quiet, relevant angst is the true glimmer in the rock music of Vienna Vienna, and what gives old sounds their modernity.

Among buttery falsettos, the stroll becomes a power walk, and the song, which ends on a high note, leaves one reflecting on how the youth have survived the tech revolution, or at least are trying. “Make A Man Out Of You” has a confident intensity à la 2003 Jack White, while “One More Last Time” is a touching bedroom acoustic-guitar-driven confession carried by sustained notes and melancholic minor chords echoing away.

In the final track, “Beauty Queen,” the supple electric guitar strings of Vienna Vienna’s guitar hammock his desperation-laced pleas for love long gone. Once again, the angst gleams honesty and engulfs the borderline grungy tones in novelty and fashion fit for today (or tomorrow). In Wonderland, Vienna Vienna challenges listeners to stop and look at our post-iPhone world and ask if this is how we wanted it all to turn out.

Listen to Wonderland below: