There are records that feel anchored to a moment, and others that seem to exist on a parallel timeline, quietly ignoring fashion and chronology. ‘Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong,’ WOO’s debut album, belongs firmly to the latter category. More than forty years on, this newly remastered double-LP reissue from Independent Project Records doesn’t sound like a historical artifact so much as a set of instructions for how to step sideways out of linear musical history.
Originally assembled in a small South London flat by brothers Mark and Clive Ives, the album has always carried the intimacy of its circumstances. The music feels hushed not because it is timid, but because it is attentive, alert to small gestures, half-formed melodies, and the emotional charge of texture itself. Acoustic guitars drift in and out of focus, clarinet lines hover like remembered conversations, and early synthesizers behave less like lead instruments than weather systems. Listening now, it’s striking how little this sounds like a “debut” in the conventional sense. Instead, it plays like a private world already fully formed.
Tracks such as “Swingtime” establish WOO’s peculiar logic immediately. A gentle rhythmic pulse underpins elastic guitar phrases and soft electronics, suggesting movement without urgency. It’s music that ambles rather than advances, inviting the listener to linger inside its spaces. “A Wave” deepens that sensation, pairing familiar acoustic strums with faintly unsettling electronic tones that bend the pastoral into something stranger, almost otherworldly. This tension runs throughout the album and is central to its enduring appeal.
Elsewhere, WOO flirt with dub, jazz, and ambient music without ever settling into any one idiom. “Wah Bass” sinks into low-end repetition and echo, its groove both playful and meditative, while “The English Style of Rowing” feels like a daydream set to motion: clarinet and guitar circling one another over a simple rhythmic figure, as if discovering the composition in real time. Even when melodies verge on the whimsical, there’s an undercurrent of melancholy that keeps the music from becoming decorative. These are not background sketches; they are quiet statements of intent.
What makes ‘Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong’ feel so prescient is its refusal to draw hard lines between genres or emotional registers. It anticipates later conversations about ambient pop, DIY electronica, and pastoral psychedelia without sounding programmatic or theoretical. Comparisons to figures like Brian Eno or The Durutti Column make sense in terms of mood and economy, but WOO’s music is less concerned with atmosphere as concept than with atmosphere as lived experience. Each track operates as a self-contained vignette, a small cinematic moment that leaves space for interpretation.
The expanded reissue only strengthens the album’s stature. The remastering brings clarity without softening its idiosyncrasies, preserving the tactile quality of the original recordings. The accompanying bonus material, drawn from the same fertile period, doesn’t feel like archival padding. Instead, it reveals alternate paths and unfinished thoughts, reinforcing the sense that WOO’s early work was less about producing a definitive statement than about following curiosity wherever it led.
Independent Project Records’ decision to present this album as a double LP feels especially apt. The label’s long-standing commitment to artists who operate outside the mainstream mirrors, WOO’s own quiet independence, and the new presentation underscores the album’s coherence as a body of work rather than a collection of tracks. It also reframes the record not as a cult curiosity, but as a foundational text in British experimental music; one that still resonates precisely because it never tried to be foundational in the first place.
Above all, ‘Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong’ endures because it trusts the listener. It doesn’t instruct, impress, or overwhelm. It simply opens a door and lets you wander. WOO’s debut remains a reminder that some of the most radical music is made by people content to move quietly, follow instinct, and accept that getting lost might be the whole point.
Releases January 16, 2026
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