WILT

Chelsea Rifkin grew up in San Fernando Valley on records by bands like Nirvana and Hole, played by her father, a record store owner. When she left for college in Chicago, her father was dying of cancer. Alone in her apartment, she picked up a guitar and the songs came naturally - they sounded like the music she'd been hearing her whole life.

She came home with songs and no intention of keeping them quiet. She found Aaron Liebman, a multi-instrumentalist producer deep in emo, Andrew Vance with shoegaze instincts, and Daniel Bermudez, a drummer raised on folk and Smashing Pumpkins. Their songs were the gravity that pulled them together. They named themselves wilt after a line from Hole's "Celebrity Skin." When they released "gwen" in fall 2022, before they'd ever played live, their social media exploded. Millions of views across Instagram and TikTok.