The duo of Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack have performed together as Wye Oak since 2006, but their new collection Every Day Like the Last: Collected Singles 2019-2023 (out June 23, 2023) represents them staking out new territory. Forging into the unknown can be terrifying—but, as Wasner notes, sitting with precarity or unfamiliarity can result in new frontiers being blown wide open. “There’s been so much uncertainty in our lives,” says Wasner. “Not just our lives personally, but everyone’s—and a big part of my life has been learning how to live inside of uncertainty, and not feel like my own emotional discomfort requires that I have to figure out, or attempt to figure out, how everything is going to be.”


The nine songs on Every Day Like the Last, which were recorded in Wasner and Stack’s current home state of North Carolina and Virginia at venues that include Stack’s backyard studio, compiles the singles Wye Oak has released since 2019’s glowing “Fortune” and includes three new songs. The songs came from a period where Wye Oak were in flux after a decade-plus of steadily releasing albums and touring. Sonically, the collection represents Wasner and Stack getting back to basics after years their music balancing the organic and the artificial, using electronics and programming to add new textures. 2020’s unfortunately shortened JOIN tour, which brought along three other musicians to fully bring Wye Oak’s catalog to life, and Stack and Wasner’s work on other projects led to the two rethinking how Wye Oak worked.


Every Day Like the Last also documents Wye Oak shifting from thinking of its work in album-length groups of songs dealing in singles, a format shift that wound up documenting their creative method in something close to real time. “Something that felt exciting to me was being a little bit more fleet-footed and light about being able to put things out into the world,” says Wasner. “A lot of these songs, we would write them and record them and then they’d come out a couple of weeks later, which, to me, just sort of feels so much more in line with how the creative process works and feels on our end of things.”


As Stack notes, the songs were written and recorded during a turbulent time—not just for him and Wasner individually, but for the world at large. “Trying to find comfort in the unknowing resonated with me a lot, and I feel like that is a thread that has run through everything—finding cheer in the doom of the world,” adds Stack. “Things have been tumultuous in so many different ways over the last four years while we’ve been [making these songs]. Both our lives have undergone extreme changes on an individual level, not even thinking about on the larger level of what everyone’s going through.”