WHEN PLACED side by side, Indianapolis-based music trio Wife Patrol’s two LPs make an interesting visual study. The cover art of Too Prickly for This World, released in 2020, portrays the members posed against a verdant, deep-green plant wall. Bassist Nicole O’Neal and drummer Natasha O’Neill mimic each other’s arms-crossed stance, while guitarist Greg O’Neill (yes, their surnames are homophones; Natasha and Greg are married) pivots playfully to the side, his hands together as if clapping. You wonder: What caught his attention at the last moment? Deep jewel tones prevail in both the plant wall and the band’s clothing choices.
The art for the group’s newest album, NOPLACE, released May 2 on all streaming platforms and available on vinyl and CD, is notably similar in composition but different in tone. Natasha and Nicole again mimic each other, this time looking off to the side (again: What are they looking at???) as Greg now eyes the camera. The colors are washed out, and a letter O is missing from the word HOOSIER in the old, red sign on the abandoned building in the background.
You have to give this odd imagery a good stare. You go looking for Easter eggs, clues to the narrative it’s telling. There’s world-building happening here.
It brings to mind a coy indie zombie film franchise where the emotional and interpersonal subplots are just as important as the gore. On Too Prickly for This World, the group’s three members look certain of themselves. But some shit went down between the first installment and the second, because in the sequel, our protagonists are a little less self-assured against the backdrop of a stonewashed wasteland.
Anyway, that’s just the art.
It very much represents the band and its music: understated, enigmatic, and a little unsettling in both its subversive musical twists and its unrelenting philosophical themes.
The first song on NOPLACE, “We Who Are About To,” is not a delicate introduction to ease you into these waters. With its lulling, bluesy rock rhythm and mysterious first lyrics, “What am I looking at? / What do I see? / Was that me? / My own face on the screen,” it is an immediate dive into a quiet existential crisis. This, along with two guitar solos—especially a face-melting one that fades the song—gives it the air of an outro. Yet, it’s the opener.
That’s kind of what you’re in for with NOPLACE, a jarring, punky, folksy, classic rock ride through various musings on existence and the apocalypse that has the overall effect of psychedelia.
Immediately, you can be assured that the album is a step away from TPFTW (which earned a slot on Bandcamp’s all-time best-selling alt-rock albums list). As its name implies, TPFTW is still brooding, but it touches on more conventional topics, mainly romantic relationships. None of that appears here. Unsurprisingly, most of the sophomore album’s songs were written amid Donald Trump’s first presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the recent presidential campaign. NOPLACE also wanders musically into more corners of the rock ’n’ roll catalog, while TPFTW is overall more straightforwardly pop-punk (with some fantastical folk and prog rock—think dragons and mystical women with swords—thrown in).
As a lifelong devotee of punk, I’m partial to the tracks that lean into the genre, like the album’s second song, “UFO.” It’s a bop, catchier and much lighter in tone than the lead-off—until you realize you’re being invited to take a ride on a UFO because there are “no problems up in space”: no time of day, no class reunions, and no emails from your estranged father.
Another favorite is “How to Lose,” a punchy anthem whose lyrics gloriously toe the line between hubris and healthy self-confidence, sung alternately by Natasha and Nicole. It’s beautiful. Fun to scream to whether you’re feeling high or low, ridiculously fun to dance to. “Ruthless” falls into the same category, critical of toxic individualism (but also maybe a little empowering?!) and super energetic, with bursts of sax and aggressive drums that put you in mind of Meg White.
As heavy as most of NOPLACE is, “323,” about the deaths of 323 wild reindeer by a lightning strike in Norway, may be the strangest and most chilling of the 10 tracks. More stripped down than the others, it puts Natasha’s heartfelt vocals front and center, forcing you to reckon with its subject. Researchers believe the strike killed the reindeer by traveling through a ground current, shocking them as they huddled together for warmth during a thunderstorm. The bodies were subsequently left to rot, blanketing the idyllic, remote landscape for years so the mass casualty event’s long-term effects on the environment could be studied. Eerie. Almost certainly intentionally, the chorus of a later, similarly plaintive song, “Old Friends” (“Old friends holding hands at the end / No sound, only mute destruction”), serves as a spooky callback to the motif of collective annihilation.
Though Natasha’s voice takes the spotlight on “323,” a Wife Patrol signature is the restrained vocals. All three members sing on different tracks, and their vocals are never overpowering, never fussy, and are often delivered with the same weight as the instrumentals, lending a ’90s garage band sincerity to the band’s sound. That’s not to say the singing is overly simplistic. Rather, every word and the way it’s sung comes across as not only deeply intentional but specifically arranged to give it the most impact alongside the other instruments.
The band’s approach to singing on tracks is the same approach it takes to everything.
“It’s egalitarian, sometimes painfully so,” says Natasha of the songwriting process, which involves each member contributing pieces of every song, including writing parts for each other to play and sing and not just their own.
“Everything gets put in a pot. We have an idea of what it looks like, and once it reaches each of us at different phases of its development … it becomes what it is,” says Nicole.
Amazingly, this process seems to have developed organically as the band’s sound and friendship deepened over time. With their rapport, you’d think they all grew up together, but 2025 marks the 10th year they’ve been playing together and, in fact, the 10th year since they’ve all known each other. Greg and Natasha met Nicole through a mutual friend when they all agreed to go hunting for a rumored Michael Jackson slot machine at a casino on New Year’s Eve 2015. They found it located next to a ZZ Top slot machine. They also talked music, and one joked, “Let’s start a family band!” So they did.
It’s easy to see why they’re so good at what they do: Their communication is out of this world, and every part of every song—and how it’s performed—is of utmost importance to each of them.
Nicole expands, explaining how they discuss and “assign” lyrics and singing parts: “Someone’s verse can feel very different coming out of someone else’s mouth, and suddenly it’s like, ‘Why did you write this? Because I don’t see it that way.’ And the answer is, ‘Oh, because you walk through this world in a completely different way than I do!’ So we ask, ‘How can we make this work?’ We have those conversations,” she says. “We each have very different experiences in this world depending on where we came from, where we lived before, gender. There are so many things that pop up, and we talk about those things, and that makes its way into a song sometimes or how we will interpret a song.”
Greg adds, “While it takes a while to make [songs] a certain way that is agreeable or inspiring to all of us, this way is the best. It’s better than any one person’s individual effort would have produced.”
While songwriting responsibilities are shared and no one in this band could be called a front person, the biggest occasional exception to the equality of the instruments is the guitar—because Greg is a beast. He absolutely shreds on several songs, leaving you feeling like you could listen to him jam for hours. When delivered live, his solos command maximum attention. I wish I had the technical vocabulary to describe how good he is, but I’ll simply say this: I listened to “We Who Are About To” three times before I even moved on to the rest of the album.
The guitar comes back to star in “NOPLACE I,” delivering dread in heavy bass and power chord riffs that, along with high-powered snare and cymbals, you can bang your head to. By contrast, “NOPLACE II” is more funky, taking you back to the mid-aughts when being adorably quirky hit the mainstream, and OK Go, excessive side bangs, and ultra-skinny jeans paired with Toms dominated.
“Equinox” offers the main glimpse of cheer on the album, written during a burst of energy when Mirror Indy asked the band to write a song commemorating spring 2024. As soon as she read the request, Nicole started recording ideas, composing most of it in an afternoon, with Natasha quickly jumping in to add a chorus and Greg to arrange. And it truly feels like spring. Its juxtaposition of sadness and hope, evoking the pleasure and pain of shaking off the frost and sprouting new buds, knocks you on your ass (“I wanna know how you come back / I wanna know how you trust in the rain / I wanna taste that ambition / I wanna believe in the sunlight again”), but it’s got a bright, choral vibe, bringing in the warmth. There’s a reason this is the outro.
Though NOPLACE grapples with a lot of darkness and doubt, its lyrics are also often overwhelmingly ambivalent, offering resilience and humor in unexpected places. And “Equinox” provides just the right amount of encouragement to pull you above the funk. There comes a point in the thick of bad times when the hard-won lessons emerge, and, as you come out of the other side of the struggle, you see the beauty of the transformation that’s taken place.
“The album for the most part feels like this struggle to have a sense of hope around the city you live in, or the times you live in, or weathering a super-negative event. But ‘Equinox’ [is about how] everything has a season. It terminates eventually,” says Greg.
Nicole shares that the pandemic forcing her outdoors, where she developed a love for hiking and birdwatching, was the motivation behind the song. “I spent a lot more time outside than I had ever spent in my life,” she explains. She even discovered vegetation growing in her yard that she’d forgotten she ever planted. “It’s easy to feel very hopeless, especially in winter in the Midwest. It’s gray. It’s cold. It feels like it’s going to last forever. … And every single time, the grass shows up. The birds come back.”
A fitting close to an honest, earnest, depressing, fun, hypnotic album that explores the scary questions, surprises you with its inspiration from across the rock landscape, and came as a result of a grueling time for us all.
OK, forget a zombie movie. If for nothing but the guaranteed good music and conversation before I die, Wife Patrol are the people I’d want to meet in the actual zombie apocalypse.
You can purchase NOPLACE on CD and vinyl at independent local record stores Indy CD & Vinyl, LUNA, Square Cat Vinyl, and Irvington Vinyl & Books, or order online. You can also catch Wife Patrol at Tube Factory on July 13.
