wiltHeadliner thistle.Support WILT In a home video, Chelsea Rifkin is five or six years old and her father, a record store owner in the San Fernando Valley who raised her on Nirvana and Hole, points the camera at her and says she’s going to be a rock star. She didn’t pay attention. Or thought she didn’t. „So many times he’d be telling me all this stuff and it sounded like a Peanuts parent,“ she says now. „That’s literally all I care about now.“ By the time she left L.A. for college in Chicago, he was dying of cancer. She spent that year coming apart — the distractions, the isolation, the hospitalizations — and it all collapsed into a single night: New Year’s Eve, home for break, her father finally gone. She went back to Chicago because she owed rent on a lease nobody would take over, and alone in that apartment she picked up a guitar. The songs came fast, and they sounded like the records he’d been playing her whole life. „The music we’re making right now is kind of like a message to him,“ Rifkin says. „It’s almost: I was always listening, even if it didn’t seem like it.“ She came home with songs and no interest in making them quietly. She found Aaron Liebman, a multi-instrumentalist producer whose taste ran deep into emo, the kind of obsessive ear that hears a song once and starts rebuilding it. Andrew Vance was another multi-instrumentalist guitarist with shoegaze instincts and a producer’s feel for texture. Daniel Bermudez was the Valley kid raised on folk and the Smashing Pumpkins who played drums like he was trying to reconcile the two. None of them would have formed this band on their own — Rifkin’s songs were the gravity that pulled them together. They named themselves wilt after a line in Hole’s „Celebrity Skin,“ and when they released „gwen“ in the fall of 2022, before they’d ever shared a stage, their social media blew it wide open. Millions of views across Instagram and TikTok. „Nothing Special