Oh Wonder On How A Writing Project Unintentionally Led To The Advent Of Their Band

"I think the technical term is 'fake it 'til you make it'," deadpans Anthony West. He's one half of English electro duo Oh Wonder, a band who, at conception, was never meant to be a band, let alone a wildly successful one.

"It began as purely a writing idea," explains Josephine Vander Gucht, Oh Wonder's other half. "We came together for songwriting, building a portfolio of songs that we could present to other artists, labels, managers, and say 'hi, we're a writing duo, we'd love to write with your artist'. The whole thing was conceived from a behind-the-scenes perspective. There wasn't any intention of going on tour or making albums. That's all been a total accident... When strangers ask 'what do you do?' and I say 'I'm in a band', that still feels alien to me."

When the pair decided to upload their first song, Body Gold, online in 2014, everything changed. "It immediately started resonating with people on this unexpectedly global level," West recounts, "we [were] getting messages from people in Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia. Within the first week, we knew we'd latched onto something different and more exciting than anything we'd ever done."

"Normally when you're in a band," Vander Gucht offers, "you're sending the [Soundcloud] link around to all your family and friends, saying 'Please listen to my song! Let me know what you think of it!' You're hoping you'll get, like, 50 plays out of it. But with [Body Gold], we didn't tell anyone about it, we just uploaded it. And it was going into the hundreds of thousands of plays in the first few days, which we thought must've been a mistake. It felt like such a fluke, compared to everything else we've ever done. But, it just continued to happen that way. So, immediately we knew that [Oh Wonder] was different to anything else we'd ever done before."

From that auspicious beginning, they've felt as if Oh Wonder has had its own momentum. "It feels like it's constantly pulling us, we're never pushing it," West says. "It doesn't feel like we've been in charge of anything," says Vander Gucht. For the next year, they released a song a month; cuts they recorded on a computer, in a studio space they'd built in a granny-flat at the bottom of the garden at Vander Gucht's parents' house. The songs would, eventually, add up to the self-titled Oh Wonder LP; the duo estimating that they spent £400 on the entire thing. "We never felt like we were making an album," Vander Gucht says. "There was no self-awareness. There was no plan."

Despite being conceived with no great ambition, Oh Wonder's 2015 debut cracked the Top 20 in Canada, and hit #26 in the UK. With its successes, the pair hit the road, hard. This was natural for West, a born traveller whose childhood was split between the Isle Of Man, Canada and England, and involved an annual trip to Australia to visit relatives. Vander Gucht, however, is a homebody, a lover of routine, more used to spending days in her parents' garden. "Touring is very alien to me, and I'm still learning to deal with everything it entails," Vander Gucht says.

This includes moving in a gang, and effectively relinquishing your privacy for extended stint. "The 12 of us," West says, of Oh Wonder's touring party of musicians, managers, and sound techs, "we all wake up together, we're all travelling together. You're experiencing these emotional highs and lows together. These aren't the people that you love, they're not your close friends or family, it's this weird little community united by the band."

Dealing with life on the road - "we love touring, but it's not our natural habitat," says West - became a key theme for the second Oh Wonder album, Ultralife. The follow-up to their self-contained debut pushes into bigger things: it was half-written in New York, partly recorded in a 'proper' studio, and is built on live takes featuring the band's touring drummer. "We had the opportunity to put this project in a whole new place, both figuratively and physicality," Vander Gucht says.

"The overarching theme" of Ultralife, Vander Gucht offers, "is the extremes of emotion that we all feel as human-beings. Feeling invincible one day, then completely trapped and isolated the next... That's what touring is for us. Touring is the perfect environment for an emotional roller coaster. You're experiencing the highest highs: performing songs that you've written for thousands of people in a foreign country is ridiculously incredible. But, then you're back on the bus, in your pyjamas, eating tortilla chips covered with cheese that you've made in the microwave. And, that happens on a daily basis. We're always trying to work our way through that, and make sense of that."