Wild Flag's carreer has "ran its course", according to drummer Janet Weiss. After releasing an album in 2011, the American indie supergroup apparently have no further plans to write or record a follow-up.
"It's hard to have a band when you live five hours apart by plane," Weiss recently told the Skinny. "It was great but I think it just kinda ran its course."
Wild Flag were founded in 2010, following the dissolution of Sleater-Kinney. Weiss and her former bandmate Carrie Brownstein teamed with the Minders' Rebecca Cole and Helium frontwoman Mary Timony, describing the project as "the sound of an avalanche taking out a dolphin." "Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced," Brownstein wrote at the time. "But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realised that we could be greater than the sum of our parts, not four disparate puzzle pieces trying to make sense of the other, but a cohesive and dynamic whole."
At the time, Brownstein was living in New York – just a few hours from Timony's home in Washington DC. But after Brownstein rejoined the other two other members in Portland, it became more difficult for everyone to be involved. Speaking to the Washington Post in May, Timony said Wild Flag were on hiatus.
Prior to that, Wild Flag toured the UK just once: visiting England and Scotland from December 2011 to early 2012, and playing All Tomorrow's Parties.
These days, Wild Flag's members are busy with other projects: Timony has a new band, Hex Ex; Weiss made a new album with Quasi; and Brownstein is a showrunner at Portlandia. But there are also signs that Brownstein and Weiss's old band could be plotting a comeback: last week, Sleater-Kinney reunited on stage for the first time in seven years, performing Neil Young's Free World with members of Pearl Jam. "For me, music is the only avenue I have for connecting with people on that deep level," Weiss told the Skinny. "The most human I ever feel is when I'm onstage playing a song and I have that feedback from an audience. It's timeless, you know? It's really indescribable ... I have to say, I was always really excited about the future, and I still am."
