Track of the Week “Summer” by Alpha Wilde is a nostalgic track that recalls the end-of-the-day ease and underlying freshness of summer.
“Summer is the first song I wrote for the EP… it’s about going through seasons in your life, obviously summer being the happiest of the seasons. The lyrics are a bit depressing, but the sound of it is uplifting,” says Arno Joubert of Alpha Wilde.
Behind the track's down-tempo intro is a quiet warmth and an incredibly genuine sound. With its lazy vocals and touch of scattered synthesised sound, "Summer" evokes the unique sound of South African pop-rock from the late 90s and early 2000s.
With a particularly sweeping guitar solo toward the end of the track, Joubert’s offering is relaxed and uncomplicated.
Joubert is a young, up-and-coming Bellville-based guitarist, vocalist and songwriter. He started playing piano when he was seven years old, but gave it up shortly after because of the heckling he received from other kids at the time. As soon as he left school, he returned to it with a newfound energy, this time adding a couple of guitars and composition to make up for lost time. And after a few detours and roadblocks on his musical journey, he’s found his groove in the electro-pop-rock sound of Alpha Wilde.“Alpha Wilde is a solo project, so I hire musicians to play live with me… It took me about five years to start this project due to a lot of issues,” he recollects. “Basically I’ve been taking this entire year to focus on songwriting.” His five-track EP, Summer, will be followed by a couple of videos that will drop during the year, along with live shows where he will be joined by long-time collaborators Anro Trollip and Etienne Fourie.