Aeon Station - "Queens" from the 2021 album Observatory on Sub Pop.

After 18 years of waiting for the Wrens to follow up their beloved 2003 triumph, The Meadowlands, we’ve finally received new music from them. Well, sort of. Frustrated with his bandmate Charles Bissell’s endlessly tinkering with his half of the planned follow-up record alongside a dispute over money cuts, Kevin Whelan is releasing his portion of songs under the name Aeon Station on December 10th. It’s a heartbreaking way to receive them, but we’ll take what we can get!

The lead single and our Song of the Day, “Queens,” was unveiled in September and is so much more than we could’ve expected. A climactic five-minute epic, the song opens as a synthy slow-burner but builds into a propulsive, thrashing rocker only to crash to its emotional guitar-strummed ending. With lines like, “You said it was all in,” it’s difficult to not read the song as Whelan’s pointed message to his former bandmate. 

Whelan claims the song was inspired by one of his all-time favorite songs, “The Winner Takes it All” by ABBA. “It’s about betting on the real you,” he explains in the press release. “Like a game of high-stakes poker, you push all your chips to the center of the table and aren’t afraid to go “all in.” When the New York Times asked Whelan in their profile on his new project about whether the song was a breakup song, he responded “More like post-break-up,” Whelan said, “when you find the strength to get on with your life.”

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