Calling a debut album Nothing Happens is either a dare or a prank, and Wallows knew exactly what they were doing. As Dylan Minnette put it, the title was designed to “open the door for bad review headlines,” a move straight out of the Is This It school of expectation management. But the irony runs deeper than a wink at critics. “We went through these periods in our teen years where not much would happen,” Minnette said. “We’d always say, ‘and then nothing happens.’ It just stuck.”
By the time the album finally arrived, plenty had happened. The band—Minnette, Braeden Lemasters, and Cole Preston—had known each other for more than a decade, cycled through multiple names, and rewritten versions of themselves along the way. What sounded like overnight success was actually a long, slow simmer. “So many things can happen in your childhood or teen years that feel like the end of the world,” Minnette said. “But as you get older, you realize nothing really happens. Everything’s okay.”
That push and pull between urgency and hindsight defines the record. Some songs had been around for years, others were brand new, and the band treated both the same way—tear them apart and rebuild them until they felt right. “The older ideas took a whole new shape,” Lemasters said. “Completely rearranged. Different instrumentation, different lyrics, just to match the vibe.” The newer songs, he added, reflected “a more current state of how we’re feeling,” but the goal was cohesion: an ending and a beginning wrapped together.
It also marked a clear dividing line from the band’s past, literally in the name. Changing to Wallows wasn’t cosmetic. “We’ve been exposed to different music, different life,” Minnette said. “Changing the name felt like committing to something for real. Like, this is us now.” It was the moment they stopped orbiting the idea of a band and decided to become one.
That decision paid off quickly—and strangely. In 2017, “Pleaser” climbed Spotify’s Viral 50 while the band was still unsigned, a modern version of getting noticed without stapling flyers to telephone poles. Preston joked they went with electric scooters instead, but the point landed: everything moves faster now. “Anything can just be at the click of a button,” he said. “We were lucky.” Once the door cracked open, they walked through it, landing an EP, then a deal with Atlantic Records, and finally the debut they’d been inching toward for years.
Despite being rooted in Los Angeles, Wallows never really felt part of an “LA scene.” “Not really,” Minnette said. “We never broke into that.” Instead, their sense of community came later, after the music was out in the world. “It was reverse engineered,” he said. “We started putting out stuff we were proud of, then made friends who were doing the same thing.” Their idea of a scene was less geographic and more spiritual—artists they admired, wherever they happened to be. The band even joked that they never quite lined up with the city’s more cartoonish exports. Steel Panther, for instance, remained a parallel universe.
Then there’s the question Wallows can’t dodge: acting. With Minnette and Lemasters both known for screen work, the band has had to navigate perception from day one. “We want people to take Wallows seriously because of the music,” Minnette said. “So in that sense, we separate them.” But pretending the acting didn’t help early visibility would be dishonest. “We’d be oblivious—or assholes—if we denied that.” The balance, he said, became clearer over time. “Everyone who’s here now is here purely because of Wallows and the music. If people didn’t like it, they wouldn’t care what show one of us is on.”
Proof of that grounding shows up in the band’s offstage habits. Their idea of rock-star content? Playing board games with other bands. “We’re flipping the script,” Preston laughed. It’s a deliberate undercutting of mythology—less smashed hotels, more Sorry! and card decks.
Reality, of course, still finds a way to intrude. Mid-tour, their bus caught fire. Not metaphorically. Literally. A generator malfunction turned the vehicle into a smoking ruin while the band was on a flight elsewhere. “Whole bus exploded,” Minnette said. Everyone was safe, but most of their clothes weren’t. Days later, passing the burn site in Arizona, their driver found charred remnants on the roadside. “That was my shirt,” Minnette said. “I wore that at Coachella.” Thrift stores and sympathetic brands helped them rebuild a wardrobe from scratch.
Even as Nothing Happens settled in, Wallows kept experimenting. A reimagined release featuring orchestral arrangements hinted at a broader palette. “We always thought strings were really beautiful,” Minnette said. “Just a cool reinterpretation, showing the songwriting in a different light.”
Ask them how they feel about the album now and they’ll shrug. It’s still too new. “Ask us in a year,” Minnette said. For a band that took a decade to arrive at its “debut,” Nothing Happens isn’t a finish line—it’s the moment the clock finally starts moving.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below!
