Since beaming to Earth with their self-titled debut in 2023, local outfit Prairiewolf has taken listeners on a cosmic journey through a heady mix of psychedelic soundscapes, polite jazz fusion and easy-listening Americana. Credit: Tyler Hickman
Nestled among the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, just outside the tight-knit town of Crestone, yawns a two-lane swath of road known as the Cosmic Highway. Peppered with kitschy green roadside aliens and a UFO watchtower, the area has become a major draw for crunchy new-age spiritualists and extraterrestrial obsessives who want to believe.
This otherworldly backdrop feels tailor-made for the music of Front Range trio Prairiewolf, who played what would turn out to be a pivotal show last spring at a Crestone café and music venue called Cloud Station. Since beaming to Earth with their 2023 self-titled debut, the Boulder County outfit has refined their singular brand of spacey, laid-back jams marked by a heady mix of psychedelic soundscapes, polite jazz fusion and easy-listening Americana.
“It felt like a turning point — it set the tone in a weird way,” multi-instrumentalist and Nederland resident Jeremy Erwin says of the 2025 gig that would lay the bedrock for their new album Zone Poems, out July 17 via Centripetal Force. “It’s appropriate that’s the source of the first song on the record.”
When Erwin calls this Crestone show the source of the new album’s 10-minute opening rip, he means it literally. Prairiewolf’s third LP was recorded live, but not in the way you might expect. Spliced, stitched and collaged together from soundboard recordings across a string of Colorado shows, including the DIY space Glob in Denver, Zone Poems is greater than the sum of its parts.
“We started the year with the intention of playing these new songs and recording an album traditionally. We wanted to get inside the songs and see where they had advanced by the end of the year, then capture that in the studio,” Erwin says. “The multi-track recordings happened to be some of our most memorable shows … Stefan [Beck, guitarist] said, ‘I think we might have a record already.’”
From there, Erwin got to work piecing together a full-length album: layering tapes on tapes, sweetening the arrangements with studio overdubs and re-cutting them into a finished product that felt both wedded to and separate from the original live material.
“Jeremy just made a record,” says Beck, a Boulder native who performs solo under the moniker Golden Brown, with more than a little amazement. “We had finished those shows, and then he went underground into mixing mode. He popped up a couple months later and was like, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ It was kind of mind-blowing that he was able to come up with what he did.”
The result of Prairiewolf’s unorthodox approach is a bold new entry in their rapidly growing discography, pulsing with the unpredictable vigor of live improvisation and the surgical precision of a finely-tuned studio cut. Both free and fussed-over, the six new tracks stretching across the album’s 40-minute runtime strike a delicate balance that feels at once like new territory and familiar terrain.
“It has some of the elements [of previous records], but I think the semi-live aspect gave it a somewhat edgier feel,” says bassist and Longmont resident Tyler Wilcox. “It felt different and a little more dangerous, but we trust the listeners to get into it.”
“I wouldn’t call it edgy,” Beck interjects with a good-natured laugh. “I think what we find edgy is not actually edgy.”
As it turns out, both band members are right. “Edgy” and “dangerous” might not be the first words that come to mind when contemplating Prairiewolf’s subdued swirl of analog drum machines and easygoing instrumental arrangements. But compared to the outfit’s terminally chill first album and its 2024 spiritual cousin Deep Time, moments on the new LP are decidedly gnarlier and more unpredictable than past efforts.
Take the album’s debut single and Side B centerpiece “Burning Edges,” the closest Prairiewolf has come to sending a 95 mph heater across home plate. The track begins with a swell of arpeggiated synth, twisting itself into a mechanical krautrock rhythm before cracking like an egg across a fidgety, fuzzed-out guitar solo that sends the track into a jarring and joyous new register.
“I remember playing that song in Crestone. It was the first time Stefan played the solo that developed into the one that’s on the record,” Wilcox recalls. “I was shocked and dismayed by it — and delighted.”
Despite these surprising new flourishes, longtime listeners shouldn’t fire up Zone Poems expecting a drastic departure from the band’s signature sound. The core of what makes a Prairiewolf record is still very much intact, even if the context is markedly different.
“When we started the group, I think we all had the intention of making music that was soothing. The times we had come out of with Covid and the [first] Trump era fucking sucked, and I just wanted to make healing music that felt good,” Erwin says. “Times have changed drastically over the past three or four years, and I don’t know if I still go in with the intention of trying to soothe people. I think everybody just wants to get lost in it.”
While Prairiewolf turn their creative gaze to the boundless expanse of the cosmos, some of the trio’s most distinguishing qualities are decidedly earthbound. Inspiration for the new album’s dirge-like opening epic “The St. Vrain Method,” the same tune that set the scaffolding for their unexpected quasi-live offering, struck as Erwin was on a multi-day backcountry hiking excursion with friends on the titular Indian Peaks Wilderness trail.
“If you’ve ever been on a longer hike with multiple people, you know someone takes the lead for a while and you get into a cadence, and then someone else will slowly take the lead — I thought of that as a way you could jam effectively,” he explains. “If you pay attention to the various instruments, someone will slowly take the lead, and then take it further. There’s a chorus section that is effectively slowing down and taking a look at the view before getting back on the trail.”
Such forethought may suggest that the celestial alchemy of Prairiewolf is the result of some carefully crafted scientific equation — an airtight approach to songcraft, handed down from on high. But as the trio’s unbreakable penchant for improv suggests, the real source of their collective power comes from an eagerness to buck the formula and strike out on a new path to the mountaintop.
“There’s a good example on ‘Dream Logic’: We had arranged that song in a slower tempo, and just in the moment, the loop pedal was at a higher tempo, so that’s how we played it,” Beck says. “So that’s how that song is now. If we play it at the slower tempo, it sounds weird.”
“I get uncomfortable when we feel too dialed-in, personally,” Erwin adds. “I have a constant need, like, ‘We’ve got to fuck something up.’ You’ve got to disturb the soil so some growth can spring up. I have a desperation to play the material in different ways, and that always stirs things. I feel like that will get us to new places.”
ON STAGE: Prairiewolf. 7 p.m. Saturday, July 18, The Electric Room at Little Horse Vintage, 820 Main St., Suite 109, Louisville. $25
