Arion Xenos, founder member of Glasgow-based quartet The Wife Guys Of Reddit, is trying to explain their self-made genre of ‘soupy rock’. ‘Have you ever listened to music and thought it sounds salty and chunky and viscous?’ he asks (rhetorically, I presume). ‘That’s what people think of when they hear our songs, ’cos sometimes when you make a soup, you’ll throw spices and veg in and hope that it works.’ ‘Or anything that’s going a bit out of date,’ quips fellow founder Niamh MacPhail.

Interviewing The Wife Guys Of Reddit is a bit like an encounter with their music: fun, chaotic, wide-ranging, spontaneous and unexpected. Speaking via Zoom from Wife Guys HQ somewhere in the heart of... somewhere, all four members are masked up. ‘We’re all waiting to get our teeth done,’ notes MacPhail. Their roots are equally mysterious. Singer/guitarist Xenos records ‘nothing of note before The Wife Guys’ but soon revises this assessment when reminded that he appeared in the same school production of Grease as keyboard player Angus Fernie.

‘Angus was a fantastic Eugene and I thought “that’s the man I’m going to be in a band with in ten years’ time”,’ says Xenos. ‘We started busking together with a repertoire of about three songs we managed to stretch out for three hours on a Saturday afternoon; a precursor to the jamming nature of The Wife Guys, you could say.’

Singer/bassist MacPhail and drummer Elise Atkinson have a background in folk and jazz respectively. MacPhail started playing bass during lockdown and reckons now that ‘maybe there wasn’t a whole lot of thought to it. Learning a new instrument almost always comes out of a place of experimentation. I was just playing around with some daft time signatures.’

The chance to submit a Sufjan Stevens cover for a charity compilation spiralled into a debut Christmas covers EP and, with lockdown lifting, MacPhail and Xenos scouted for bandmates. ‘I’d never heard someone play the hi-hat so quickly,’ says Xenos of Atkinson. ‘And then I met them all at a swimming pool for our first photo shoot,’ says Atkinson of her new bandmates.

Since early 2021, there has been a flurry of singles and EPs, including ‘Wet And Tired’, ‘Pig Fat’ and ‘The Wife Guys Walk Into Oncoming Traffic’, all of which are easily as good as their gonzo titles. Psych, punk, jangle pop, rangy rock, they’ve got the lot.

‘We’re much more fans of seeing how things can be built up and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t,’ says MacPhail. However, the band have been forced to slow their pace somewhat since MacPhail contracted long covid in 2023. ‘One positive that we’ve taken from that is that we’ve had more time to think about what our sound actually is,’ she says. Right on time for the writing of their debut album, soon to be recorded for a 2025 release. ‘I think we’ve moved in a slightly quieter direction, more song-focused. We’ve been forced to sit with what we’re doing a bit more which has benefited the album.’

The Wife Guys Of Reddit headline Hayburn Park Music Festival, Glasgow, Saturday 7 September.