White Woolly’s music culls freely from the surf-rock sounds of the 1960s, but the titles on this band’s rousing debut—“End Times,” “Strugglin’,” “Death’s Door”—don’t exactly summon a sunny day at the beach. The promising Louisville trio plays vintage rock 'n' roll with a seductive, sinister edge, which boils over on the sludgy tension of “Fisticuff” or the ominous riffage of “Drag On.” “We play surf rock, and people are like ‘Oh, like The Beach Boys?’ and we’re like, No! We like them, but no,” says bassist Leah Outlaw.
A sense of apocalyptic malaise filters into White Woolly’s reverb-soaked reveries: “I’m a dead man walking alone to my grave / Not a moment passes I feel okay,” sings Charlie Hill on the brooding “End Times,” one of several songs that flits between the contemporary influence of garage-rockers like Ty Segall or Osees and the cinematic haze of a long-ago Western soundtrack.