On the far lip of the respectable world, Dmitry Wild has built himself a crooked little kingdom: part Eastern European exile, part downtown raconteur, part rock-and-roll stray with a guitar slung like a loaded dare. He carries himself like a man who has seen the fine print on the American dream, and decided to set it on fire for warmth. Nothing about him sits squarely in the frame, which is precisely his charm. Wild approaches American roots music the way a clever thief approaches an unlocked Cadillac: with affection, mischief, and a dangerous eye for where the road might go.
He carries himself like a man who has seen the fine print on the American dream, and decided to set it on fire for warmth.
His new single has two songs: Fiery and I Don’t Wanna Fight. Fiery is a delirious little rock-and-roll séance that swaps the sermon for a cracked smile, a raunchy guitar lick, and the sort of rhythm section that seems to have been awake for two days and loving every rotten minute of it. The song rolls in with echoing vocals, a Rhodes-style organ needling the air, and a bass line that keeps things loose without letting the floorboards collapse. There’s a spaghetti western sting to it, too, as if some doomed gunslinger wandered into a Lower East Side bar, ordered cheap whiskey, and found The Doors arguing with Link Wray in the corner.
The groove has that same garage-born rattle, that same roots-rock recklessness, but the feeling is more street-corner standoff than open-road escape.
Wild channels the same fevered party electricity that once made bands like Suicide, Lords of the New Church and The Gun Club. Fiery, however, never sounds trapped in a museum case with a label reading “vintage sleaze.” It is alive in the hips, in the heel, in the cigarette burn on the sleeve. It rides the open rails with a Kerouac grin, headed for who knows where, probably somewhere with a busted jukebox, an unpaid tab, and a woman in red who knows the drummer by name.
Its companion, Don’t Wanna Fight, comes from the same smoke-stained room, though it kicks the furniture around in a different mood. Where Fiery feels like a train jumping the tracks toward some desert hallucination, Don’t Wanna Fight staggers in with its palms up and its teeth showing, equal parts truce and trouble. The groove has that same garage-born rattle, that same roots-rock recklessness, but the feeling is more street-corner standoff than open-road escape. Wild sounds like a man trying to talk himself out of a brawl while already halfway through throwing the first punch.
There’s a nasty little humour to it, the kind rock-and-roll used to have before everybody got busy polishing their press photos and pretending danger could be scheduled. Don’t Wanna Fight leans into the contradiction of its title, finding comedy in conflict and romance in bad decisions. The guitar prowls, the rhythm shuffles with a crooked hip, and Wild sings as if every apology has a switchblade tucked behind its back.
What makes Dmitry Wild work is that he never seems to be auditioning for cool. Musician, rocker, poet, wordsmith, actor: sure, stack the hats on his head until he looks like a vaudeville scarecrow, but the musical alter ego is the one driving the car. Fiery has pulp in its teeth and gas fumes in its lungs, and it treats roots rock as a living beast rather than a sacred cow.
By the end, you get the sense Wild has not written a song so much as staged a small, glorious bar fight between romance, road dust, and old American myth. Nobody wins cleanly. Everybody leaves marked.
Pre-save the "Fiery" Single here
CREDITS
Dmitry Wild – Guitars / Vox (all tracks)
Song Writer – Dmitry Wild
Hannah Moorhead – Bass
Alex Wernquest – Drums
Keyboards (Fiery) – Fima Chupakhin
Sax (Don’t Wanna Fight) – Justin Birk
Recorded at Basement Floods Recordings, Catskill, NY
Engineered by Alex Wernquest
Mixing Engineer – Shubham Mondal
Produced by Paul Martin
Mastered by Joe Lambert
Poster by Hypno Doll
Album Cover art by Anna Azarov
