Wilder Maker

Wilder Maker is the Brooklyn based avant-indie project of songwriter, vocalist, and saxophonist Gabriel Birnbaum, joined by longtime members, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins, and Adam Brisbin, as well as Birnbaum’s longest standing collaborator and Wilder Maker auxiliary member Katie Von Schleicher. The band broke out with 2018's sprawling concept album Zion, followed by 2022's Male Models, a shapeshifting record that handed lead vocals to guests including Adam Duritz of Counting Crows and Felicia Douglass of Dirty Projectors while moving through electrified soul, folk songs, and indie rock. Alongside the band, Birnbaum records under his own name, most recently on 2023's Patron Saint of Tireless Losers, bending classic American songforms toward economy and direct emotional resonance. Wilder Maker's current work is a planned trilogy telling the tale of one long night in the city, from dusk to dawn: it began with 2025's The Streets Like Beds Still Warm and continues with Smoking the Bunny, records built from band improvisations that Birnbaum edits, processes, and reshapes into songs, with vocal melodies comped together before any lyrics are written. Made after Birnbaum stepped away from the music industry as a livelihood to become a psychotherapist, the trilogy draws his histories in free jazz, indie rock, and home recorded ambience into something that sounds like none of them exactly, landing somewhere in the territory between Talk Talk, Broadcast, and Ry Cooder.