Wolf Gang, Atlas Genius, The Royal Concept

It was perhaps inevitable that Max McElligott would one day make an ornate pop album of near-symphonic grandeur named after a utopian place that came to him in a dream. It might not have been written in the stars that he would make said album, Suego Faults, with one of America’s best producers, Dave Fridmann, nor that he would do it under the guise of Wolf Gang, but the rest now looks something like a certainty when you consider his background. Still only 24, Max moved around a lot as a child because… Show more of his historian father’s work, from Hull to Ann Arbor near Detroit in the States to St Andrews in Scotland. It was there that he joined a local pipe band where, in his kilt, he would march down the cobbled streets. “It was,” he recalls, “very rousing.” Another factor that contributed to his love of the symphonic and grand was his violinist mother’s tendency to take her son to concerts as a child where he would watch her play with a full orchestra. “When you’ve seen a symphony orchestra banging out Mozart’s Requiem at full blast, created completely acoustically, that can be rousing, too,” he says, recalling the visceral power of the music. “The ridiculous levels of bass produced by the cellos and the choir- you can feel it hit your chest. To experience that when you’re young and small when everything is big anyway, to have it implanted in your brain - well, it definitely had an impact.”

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