Wilds is a collection of nine songs culled from around fifty tracks recorded by Shauf during the writing of his widely lauded last album, 2020’s The Neon Skyline.

Presented in a near-unfiltered form, the unstudied rawness of the songs on Wilds is a revealing look at Shauf’s mindset during the time he was writing Skyline. Though it’s not necessary to be familiar with The Neon Skyline to “get” Wilds, the album can certainly be interpreted as a companion piece to that record, a revisiting of the doomed lovers throughout various stages of their relationship. The songs are presented here in their most nascent shape – Shauf playing all the instruments, coming up with the arrangements on the fly, and recording it all himself to “a little tape machine” in his studio in Toronto.

All songs on Wilds were written and recorded closely together, during a period when Shauf became disenchanted with the idea of centering the Skyline narrative around one night at a bar. To shake off the writer’s block, he began experimenting with a different concept, penning songs about a woman named Judy. Shauf ultimately decided to return to his original plan, but the creative exercise was fundamental to what Skyline eventually became.