The new album is a stunning and sophisticated debut for the Minnesota folk band.
Music Review: Wren + Wilde’s Serial Dreamers artwork.
Tight and precise harmonies are the gold of the sonic landscape. Hilary Yoder and Bethany Olivares of Minnesota’s Wren + Wilde are stunning live performers with a uniquely beautiful harmonic and melodic pairing. They’ve added live harmonies to songs this reviewer has written, and the result produced pure wonder. When they announced their work on a full-length recording, there was a deep interest in seeing how their songs and voices translated to album form.
Now we know. Serial Dreamers, their debut album, was released October 7th, 2026.
These voices float light and precise, and the songs are western sky–expansive—starting with the opening track “Gitchigami.” The song’s powerful waves of music collapse to a single banjo part at several points. The in-between parts are dramatic, big, and intense—much like the water for which it is named. This song feels like something that requires a giant stage and rock show lighting, with drum work that is simply epic. Throughout, Yoder and Olivares match the magnitude and force of the subject matter (and a ripping guitar solo) with lofty and power-infused vocals.
Lead singer Hilary Yoder’s voice has a definite Stevie Nicks influence. It is lithe and embellished with a lacy flutter, yet her songwriting requires a wide range and vocal intensity. Yoder delivers with an underlying effortlessness. Bethany Olivares’s harmony work is inventive and dead-on without fail through every twist, turn, and vocal run of this album. The two weave their voices with a seeming ease.
Each of these songs feels like a radio hit waiting to find the airwaves. Yoder’s songwriting and the band’s delivery are wide and varied—containing the kind of melodies and changes that could keep the FM listener hooked from moment to moment for the duration of the entire album. There’s inventive motion and development in each and every song. It’s difficult to describe how truly innovative Yoder’s melodic ideas are. Once you think you’ve heard what the shape of each song will be, refined variation or turn in the melodies makes you lean in to listen even closer.
Wren + Wilde are gifted at creating openly honest and genuine songs, like the achingly plaintive three-quarter time “Luella” and the simple, sweet, and stunning “Slow Living”:
Let’s build a life we can sink into
Soak in the fine substance of me and you
Let build a home we can rest our bones in
Let’s build a life, ain’t nothing like slow livin’ and you
Through this beauty of a song, it’s as though Yoder has tapped into the yearning most humans share for a peaceful existence of shared meaning. By generously singing her honest vision of what matters, she gives voice to something listeners already know but seldom stop to notice, and we’re delighted to be reminded of it.
Photo Credit: Corey and Hilary Yoder
There are also tracks on this album that give you the irresistible urge to move your hips and shoulders, including barroom shuffles like “Haunted House,” where you can feel the Texas swing in your chest and the sawdust under your boots. “This Ring” has a syncopation that draws you back to a Fleetwood Mac–infused memory one stutter step at a time. That song contains a novel and brilliant use of a pugilistic metaphor as a way to draw a lover out of stoic silence. The boxing ring is used as the setting for feinting a lover back into engagement:
But I need a fighter please
Don’t leave me here in the dark
The grooviest among these tantalizing cadences is the bossa nova sway of the sultry “Heartstrings.” Yoder has written irresistible repeated triplets into the verse rhythms that the lyrics first highlight with “boom, boom, boom.” From that point forward these rhythmic hits are given their own space while the voices of Yoder and Olivares swirl around them.
This track features the mellifluous and velvet tones of Olivares swapping verses with Yoder. The contrast in the timbre of their voices is something rare and beautiful, a music of the spheres that makes a sound greater than either could achieve alone. All through this captivating track, smooth and slightly dangerous guitar work steps through swinging saloon doors and smiles with a low hungry growl.
The listener comes away from Serial Dreamers feeling as though Wren + Wilde have given every last thing to these songs and have laid it all out within the grooves of this LP. There’s a classic tinge to the edges of these songs that draws you back to all the heartbreak and profoundly simple and enduring love you’ve ever experienced. Every song on the album is catchier than the last. Yoder writes with a sophistication that makes me hope Wren + Wilde’s sophomore effort arrives much sooner than later.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Doyle Turner. Photo credit: no_aesthetic_stills.
Doyle Turner loves words. Whether it is shaping syllables into songs, poems, early morning journals, handwritten thank yous, lists, or album reviews, he is in a deep and abiding relationship with his college-ruled paper, Uniball Signo 207 .7mm pens, and mostly his keyboard. A good day is spent taking pictures, mailing things, making the words convey the precise meaning, driving, and singing.
