Album Review - The Smith Street Band "Once I Was Wild"

There are bands that grow older, and there are bands that simply grow truer. The Smith Street Band has always belonged to the latter category. From the first chorus of Once I Was Wild, it’s clear they’re not trying to reinvent themselves so much as refine the storm, to take every cracked voice, every bruised lyric, every stubborn ounce of hope, and hammer it into something sharper, heavier, and impossibly more human.

Where past records have sprawled, sometimes messy in the way life is messy. Once I Was Wild feels like a band that has learned to breathe underwater. The tempos aren’t afraid to slow down, the guitars aren’t afraid to step back and let lyrics bruise in real time, and Wil Wagner’s voice sits dead center like the friend at the bar who tells you the honest thing you don’t want to hear. The result is a record that feels less like a comeback and more like a confession captured at the exact moment before dawn.

Wagner has never shied away from vulnerability, but here he writes with the clarity of someone who understands that vulnerability isn’t a performance, it’s an inevitability. Tracks simmer with that uniquely Australian kitchen-table poetry: working-class frustration, mental health wounds that never quite scab over, and the kind of friendships built from shared cigarettes outside 1am train stations. These aren’t grandiose metaphors or attempts at universal anthems. They’re snapshots. And that’s why they land with the force of lived experience.

This album feels like a diary entry you weren’t meant to read, but they’re leaving it open anyway, because storytelling is how punk bands stay alive.

Musically, Once I Was Wild doesn’t abandon the band’s scrappy roots, it just chooses its punches more deliberately. The guitars remain raw and locomotive, the rhythm section still has that pogo-in-a-pub heartbeat, but the aggression is no longer constant. Songs expand and contract with intention. There are moments when the mix clears out just long enough for a single line to slice you to pieces, and then everything comes crashing back like the world outside didn’t stop just because your brain did.

It’s not “polished,” not in the way major-label punk is polished. It’s focused. This is the sound of musicians who know their tools well enough to create absence on purpose, to let silence linger in the room like another instrument.

One of the most striking things about the record is what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t offer a redemption arc. It doesn’t pretend healing is linear. Instead, it sits in the liminal space, older, scarred, still willing to fight but less interested in romanticizing the pain that built the band.

Once I Was Wild speaks to the exhausted adult punks who still believe in something maybe smaller than the dreams we had at 17, but more durable. It’s a record about trying to live, not trying to win.

In 2025, punk is saturated with nostalgia cycles and algorithm-driven scene churn. The Smith Street Band embrace a different approach honest craft over trend, emotional specificity over posturing. They continue to embody that stubborn orgcore ethos: community, imperfection, and the hard-won belief that songs still matter.

Once I Was Wild isn’t their loudest album or their most explosive. It is, however, one of their most grounded an intimate, unguarded portrait of a band aging alongside their audience, refusing to sanitize the journey.

They once were wild. They still are, just in the way adults are wild: surviving, reaching out, telling the truth even when it hurts.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5. A landmark entry in their catalog, and one of the most necessary punk records of the year.