WHEEL | Charismatic Leaders (2024)

Wheel‘s third studio album, “Charismatic Leaders,” has been released on  May 3rd 2024 via InsideOut Records. 

“Normally, ‘charismatic leader’ is a term used to describe the leader of a cult,” Lascelles explains. “I think the meaning is changing, considering how we’ve seen politics evolve over the past ten years. It seems to be less and less about policy; it’s more and more about these cults of personality, like we’ve seen with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. I started seeing these people everywhere and thought, ‘There’s probably enough information here to do an album.” Source.

The album was meticulously crafted to meet Wheel’s ever-heightening benchmarks and recording with engineers/co-producers Daniel Bergstrand and Fredrik Thordendal (Meshuggah) stretched from August to December 2023. The end result, mixed by Forrester Savell, has consolidated all the gains of what came before: singer/guitarist James Lascelles, lead guitarist Jussi Turunen and drummer Santeri Saksala’s third album represents their heaviest and most conscious music to date.