About The Wonder Licks (NYC Futuristic Americana)
The Wonder Licks
We’re The Wonder Licks — a New York–based Americana band that plays with a mix of raw feel, timeless sound, and unstoppable energy.
Fulgurite is what happens when lightning strikes mud. It’s also what listening to The Wonder Licks feels like: somewhere on the banks of the Big Muddy, in a white-hot flash of sound and fury, Americana music grew legs, stood up, and called itself a band.
Our story begins with Jacob Wunderlich, raised on classical piano lessons and classic radio. At 18, he moved to Nashville with delusions of grandeur, teaching himself guitar and finding a voice inspired by My Morning Jacket, Bowie, Wilco, and Kate Bush.
At Belmont University, Jacob met drummer Tyler Reina through a housing lottery gone right. Together they formed the psych-rock outfit Vega Maestro, releasing Hello Voyeur (2020) and God Mic (2023). Jacob also dropped a solo thesis project, Prone To Fits Of Madness (2019), drawn from the poetry of T.S. Eliot.
By 2023, The Wonder Licks released their debut full-length, K, Ok, O.K., OKAY!, alongside the video for “I’m Not Going To Sit In Your Back Pocket.” The following year, their live studio album Life at 7 kHz propelled the band into new sonic territory.
Today, The Wonder Licks are Jacob (vocals, piano, and guitar), Tyler (drums), Sammy Westervelt (bass), and a rotating cast of players who occupy a centripetal force within New York City’s ever-developing independent music scene. Critics are calling their sound “imaginative and new…without a twinge of replication” and “folky new wave…like cartwheeling through the woods.”
The band is set to release the first single from their upcoming LP, Simping for Big Toilet, produced by John Jackson (The Kinks, The Jayhawks, Caleb Caudle, Trapper Schoepp), in autumn 2025.
At the end of the day, The Wonder Licks are here to melt your face with the best music you’ve never heard.