Wild Yaks Announce Live Album & Rockaway Beach Concert

Brooklyn-based "roman candle of a band" (The New York Times) Wild Yaks are excited to announce Live At Rippers, their fifth LP and first live album, due July 16, 2021 via Ernest Jenning Record Co. / Open Ocean. Hear "Last Tears of the Night (Live at Rippers)" HERE. Alongside its digital release, Live At Rippers will be available in a run of 500 LPs with jackets hand-screened in Rockaway Beach, NY.

Fittingly for a band that played the last show at Rippers before last year's pandemic-related shutdown (at which this album was recorded), Wild Yaks are proud to be the first band back at the venue in 2021, setting a performance there for July 17.

For Wild Yaks, music is a gift. It's the ability to take the horrible parts of life, and elevate them into a sacred, firey riot. "I think my chief interest is to transform despair into moments for celebration. What I'm trying to do is rejoice in what's fragile, and rejoice in what's already broken. The only thing that I will accept is being fully abandoned. It's about moving and singing with no concern for the consequences," says Wild Yaks' frontman and songwriter Rob Bryn.

Live at Rippers presents this vision and the band's "sense-clobbering" performance better than any album to date. It was recorded at the Rockaway Beach punk-rock-beach-burger-joint Rippers in October of 2019. Bryn again: "Almost all of the songs grew out of moments that happened in Rockaway. And to perform them at Rippers on the altar of blood from which so many of these things sprang is strange and amazing."

For fans of the Wild Yaks, the record is everything we could have hoped for: a tidal wave of energy from beginning to end, and six men shouting at the top of their lungs in the auditory equivalent of the last dance before the apocalypse. And when you listen to this recording, somehow, miraculously, it actually feels like you are there.

Wild Yaks play an ecstatic fusion of punk rock and big-city folk reinforced with passionate vocals (often delivered in unison by the full membership). The band was formed in the fall of 2007 in Brooklyn, New York by singer/guitarist Rob Bryn and drummer/vocalist Martin Cartagena. While many players have made their way through the Yaks' over the years, today's lineup is Jose Aybar (bass), Patsy Carroll (guitar), Giovanni Kincade (Farfisa), Matt Walsh (guitar), plus Cartagena and Bryn. The Yaks' discography also includes the EP 10 Ships (Don't die yet, 2009), and full-length albums Million Years (2012), Rejoice! God Loves Wild Yaks (2015), and Great Admirer (2019). The band's music has been featured in numerous television shows and films, most notably their live performance in an episode of Law and Order SVU. They are hard at work writing new songs in Rockaway Beach and preparing for a summer of charged performances and communal magic.

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