In a Los Angeles studio built on the ghosts of classic rock, three Australians spent the middle of 2005 making a record that sounded like it had been dug out of 1970. Wolfmother, an Australian trio, were recording their first album at Sound City Studios, the same room where hard rock had been forged decades earlier. On October 31, 2005, that album, simply titled Wolfmother, appeared in Australian record shops. Nobody could have guessed how far it would travel.
The record arrived on Modular Recordings, a small Australian label, and almost immediately found a champion in Triple J, the national youth radio station. The station made Wolfmother its album of the week starting October 28, 2005, three days before the official release. That early radio push helped the album climb to number three on the ARIA Albums Chart. A debut from an unknown band was suddenly one of the biggest records in the country.
What made Wolfmother stand out was how brazenly it reached backwards. The sound was thick, riff-heavy hard rock and heavy metal in the vein of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Critics also heard echoes of more recent bands like Queens of the Stone Age and The White Stripes. Some reviewers accused the trio of simply imitating those acts. But the songs were sharp enough that the argument never slowed the album down.
Dave Sardy and the international edition
The band had help shaping that sound. Producer Dave Sardy oversaw the sessions and mixed the record, while percussionist Lenny Castro and flutist Dan Higgins added texture to several tracks. The Australian edition was shorter, but when Interscope Records prepared the international release in 2006, the album grew. A new song, "Love Train," was added, and the track order was reshuffled.
Singles began to bite. "Joker & the Thief" reached number eight on the ARIA Singles Chart. "Mind's Eye" and "Woman" became radio fixtures, and six songs from the album landed in Triple J's Hottest 100 countdown, with "Mind's Eye" peaking at number six. That was a record haul for one album. By 2007 the record had gone five times platinum in Australia, and it sold more than one million copies worldwide.
The Frazetta cover and Wal-Mart
The cover art caused its own stir. The image came from Frank Frazetta's painting The Sea Witch, showing a nymph on a rock against a blue-orange sky. The nudity was too much for Wal-Mart, which sold the album with an alternate cover: just the band's white logo on a black background. It was a fitting detail for a record that wanted to be both a throwback and a provocation.
The album's reach stretched beyond Australia. It climbed to number 25 in Britain and number 22 in the United States, earning gold certifications in both countries. Lars Ulrich of Metallica said publicly that he thought the debut was stunning and that he listened to it every day after it came out. Praise from a member of one of the bands Wolfmother was accused of imitating felt like vindication.
Wolfmother became the only album to feature co-founders Chris Ross and Myles Heskett, who left the group in 2008. The record's afterlife continued: in 2015 a tenth-anniversary edition appeared with demos, acoustic versions, and remixes. The album also placed 39th on ARIA's list of the best albums of the 2000s. Two decades on, the debate about imitation matters less than the fact that the songs still sound enormous. The tenth-anniversary edition also included acoustic and remixed material. Among the extras were an acoustic version of "Vagabond" and remixes by MSTRKRFT and Chicken Lips.