Hot Press meets Young Wonder

As Daft Punk advance their chart domination by way of icy robot alter egos, another very human electronic duo are causing a fuss of their own, based around shapeshifting beats, razor-sharp hooks and some highly creative visual accompaniment.

It all kicked off 16 months ago, when two Corkonians, Rachel Koeman and Ian Ring, uploaded their first song to YouTube under the Young Wonder moniker.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Koeman remembers. “We just said, ‘Right, we’ll put this up and see what the reactions is.’”
The track attracted a barrage of online love, and pretty soon, Young Wonder were performing at Electric Picnic, supporting Mercury Prize winners Alt-J in London and racking up hundreds of thousands of views for their videos.
“The internet platform is at least as important as playing gigs these days,” Koeman suggests. “There’s just so many people you can reach. A lot of our fans are from America, Italy and random countries that would never know us if we weren’t on Soundcloud or Tumblr or Facebook. It’s crucial.”
For all the online support, being from Cork has also played a huge part in the duo’s head-spinning success.
“I went to a school in Cork that was massively into music and singing and choir,” Koeman says. “There’s a really good music scene in Cork and lots of great people out there to help you and make you better. I think it’s the people, more than the place, that have got us to where we are.”
One example are Feel Good Lost, a Cork-based visual production collective who have collaborated with Young Wonder on countless projects.
“It’s different for every video,” Koeman tells me. “Usually Brendan (Canty of Feel Good Lost) has an idea in his head: it might just be one visual or a colour. For the ‘Electrified’ video, we wanted to go with something that was really cool – not necessarily with a narrative, but something that was a bit mad, because that’s what the song is.”
Next thing, she was crooning alongside a masked man wielding an angle-grinder.
“That’s actually my dad!” she laughs, “and my cat is in the video as well! I’m obsessed with her, you’ve no idea.”
‘Electrified’ wasn’t the first Young Wonder video to put a focus on Ireland’s iconically craggy countryside.
“We have some gorgeous landscapes so why wouldn’t we want that in our videos? It’s nice for international people to look at our video and say, ‘Oh yeah, they’re from Ireland’, rather than us using videos that you wouldn’t know where they’re shot.”
On top of operating as an unofficial tourist board, Young Wonder have got a furiously busy few months ahead of them, including a potential follow-up to new EP Show Your Teeth.
“At the moment we’re working on a remix,” Koeman says. “It’s a very cool indie band beginning with the word ‘black’! (My money’s on Eyed Peas – Ed). It’s kind of a remix/slash collaboration so I’m going to be singing on the remix and they’re doing a remix for us as well.
“With the last EP, we didn’t really know if we wanted to do an EP or an album, we just worked towards what we were working towards. That seems to be the way it operates for us, so I think we’re going to stick to that.”
There’s also talk of introducing a guitarist and percussionist for their upcoming festival shows.
“If it builds the sound then why not?” Koeman muses. “The bigger the better is kind of the way I see things.”

Show Your Teeth is out now. Young Wonder play the Sea Sessions, Donegal (June 22); Castlepalooza, Tullamore (July 2); Indiependence, Mitchelstown (3) and Longitude, Dublin (20).