On March 11, 2008, Cincinnati-native Bay Area transplant Yoni Wolf and fellow local musical brothers Josiah Wolf (also Yoni’s actual brother) and Doug McDiarmid saw the album on which they’d spent months working, Alopecia, released into the wild. Issued by experimental Hip Hop label Anticon (which Wolf co-founded), the album would prove to be a landmark moment in WHY?’s history, marking a pronounced evolutionary sonic shift and the true beginnings of Wolf & Co.’s imminent global success as a recording and touring band.
Prior to Alopecia, WHY? was primarily a solo studio guise for Wolf’s wildly imaginative Hip Hop explorations. His brother and McDiarmid had joined him in California to begin performing live as a full band, but WHY? became a true ensemble project with Alopecia. It also marked a rather sharp turn into the kaleidoscopic, slanted Indie Pop realm for which the group would become so beloved. It’s not quite like when Wizard of Oz goes from black-and-white to color, because Wolf’s Hip Hop work was deeply and uniquely compelling in its own way and certainly not devoid of colorfulness. Replace the black-and-white start of Wizard of Oz with Eraserhead and the in-color part of Oz with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and you’re a little closer to a fair analogy of what Alopecia represented in WHY’s creative history.
This year, WHY? has been marking the 10th anniversary of Alopecia in several ways. Over the past few weeks, Wolf and WHY?’s current label, Joyful Noise, have been unraveling a series of short behind-the-scenes videos from the album’s recording sessions, which you can watch back-to-back below.
Today, Joyful Noise released a 10th-anniversary reissue of Alopecia, alongside a companion 7-inch single featuring two remixes of tracks from the LP — Boards of Canada’s take on the stone-cold WHY? classic “Good Friday” and DNTEL’s rewiring of “By Torpedo or Chron’s.”
In two weeks, WHY? kicks off an extensive run of dates that will have them playing Alopecia in full all over the world. The first Alopecia show of the circuit goes down Aug. 31 in their hometown’s Woodward Theater. Tickets are on sale now, while they last.
This article appears in Aug 15-22, 2018.