WILT

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In a home video, Chelsea Rifkin is five or six years old and her father, a record store owner in the San Fernando Valley who raised her on Nirvana and Hole, points the camera at her and says she’s going to be a rock star. She didn’t pay attention. Or thought she didn’t. “So many times he’d be telling me all this stuff and it sounded like a Peanuts parent,” she says now. “That’s literally all I care about now.”

By the time she left L.A. for college in Chicago, he was dying of cancer. She spent that year coming apart — the distractions, the isolation, the hospitalizations — and it all collapsed into a single night: New Year’s Eve, home for break, her father finally gone. She went back to Chicago because she owed rent on a lease nobody would take over, and alone in that apartment she picked up a guitar. The songs came fast, and they sounded like the records he’d been playing her whole life. “The music we’re making right now is kind of like a message to him,” Rifkin says. “It’s almost: I was always listening, even if it didn’t seem like it.”

She came home with songs and no interest in making them quietly. She found Aaron Liebman, a multi-instrumentalist producer whose taste ran deep into emo, the kind of obsessive ear that hears a song once and starts rebuilding it. Andrew Vance was another multi-instrumentalist guitarist with shoegaze instincts and a producer’s feel for texture. Daniel Bermudez was the Valley kid raised on folk and the Smashing Pumpkins who played drums like he was trying to reconcile the two. None of them would have formed this band on their own — Rifkin’s songs were the gravity that pulled them together.

They named themselves wilt after a line in Hole’s “Celebrity Skin,” and when they released “gwen” in the fall of 2022, before they’d ever shared a stage, their social media blew it wide open. Millions of views across Instagram and TikTok. “Nothing Special” hit Spotify’s New Music Friday. KROQ started spinning them. The audience arrived before the band had a chance to. They’ve spent the years since earning it. Support slots with Lovejoy, Taylor Acorn, and The Warning taught them how to win over rooms that didn’t know their name. A sold-out headline debut at the Moroccan Lounge proved the internet translated to real life. A deal with AWAL. “Bite My Tongue” catching fire. Then the rooms got bigger and farther apart, sweaty and packed with people who already knew every word — eventually stretching into full U.S., UK, and EU tours supporting Taylor Acorn.

From the outside, it looked like a band on an uncomplicated upward trajectory. It wasn’t. Rifkin lives with bipolar disorder, and no amount of good news made the internal math work. The streams climbed. The rooms sold out. The feeling of deserving none of it kept pace. “I feel guilty that I’m sick of my success,” she says, “because it’s the kind of success I didn’t necessarily want.”