The Wrecks Find Clarity in Chaos and Solitude on their New Album, “Inside”

Sometimes, isolation can lead to whole new realizations and creative outlets.

Picture this: it’s 2 AM in Los Angeles. The city is asleep or pretending to be. In a quiet room, lit by the blue haze of a laptop screen, Nick Anderson of The Wrecks is combing through scraps of footage and half-fleshed visuals, fine-tuning the next chapter of a record that nearly broke his brain.

The band’s new album “Inside” is less a collection of songs and more a magnificent and chaotic fever dream turned clarity. It's the product of two years spent in varying states of solitude- beginning in a barn in Western New York and ending in a small, tight home studio in LA, where Anderson often forgets he’s even in the city.

Regarding “Inside,” Anderson says The Wrecks—long resistant to being pinned down by genre—don’t write with categories in mind. “Genre’s never been at the front of it,” Anderson notes. “It’s always been about the challenge of trying something I’ve never done before. That’s the drive.” That drive, though, stalled for a time.

After 2022’s Sonder, a wave of creative inertia hit. “For the first year, I didn’t have anything to say. I was making things, but I had nothing to say.” It became a frustrating loop of trying, struggling, and failing until, finally, something clicked.

What emerged from that creative crucible was a record of the breakdown and reassembly of self. “Inside” is isolation-induced disintegration and the slow, painful identity reformation. “It’s about trying so hard in isolation that it broke my brain,”

Anderson explains. “The world started seeping in through the cracks of the studio walls. It’s about becoming, self-realizations, and spending time with yourself until you’re kind of forced to.”

Songs on “Inside” were chosen with a particular honesty in mind. At one point, Anderson was overwhelmed by contradictions—conflicting perspectives and countless half-baked ideas. “It got confusing. I had a billion things I was chasing. I had to step back and ask: ‘What do I actually know? What feels honest?’” The answer led to a record that resonates with themes of neurodivergence, self-reflection, and the push-

pull of connection and alienation.

Even with all the chaos, for The Wrecks, it’s still about the moment at the end of the night: finishing a song, sitting on the couch, pressing play. “That’s the tip of the mountain for me,” Anderson says. The Wrecks may live in LA, one of the world's glitziest and most glamorous cities, but the music they’ve created is still deeply personal.

With “Inside,” they’ve cracked the seal on something fragile and ferocious: the sound of breaking apart just enough to see who you really are.