There is a specific kind of joy that Cory Wong seems constitutionally incapable of suppressing, and this self-titled 2022 record is seventy minutes of evidence.
Wong had already built a reputation as Vulfpeck’s secret weapon — the rhythm guitarist who made tight feel looser, who made chicken-scratch funk sound like it cost money. But Cory Wong the album is something else. It’s a statement of solo identity delivered with the confidence of a man who has spent years being the best musician in every room and finally decided to decorate his own room.
The Minneapolis Thread
The album was recorded at Flowers Studio in Minneapolis, which matters. Minneapolis has its own gravitational pull on a certain kind of meticulous, groove-forward music — you hear it in the way the low end sits, dry and present and unhurried. Engineer Jake Alley keeps the mix clean without making it clinical. There’s air around everything, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.
Wong produced the record himself, which is the right call. Nobody else was going to let the guitar do what it does here.
The rhythm guitar playing is, without qualification, some of the best you will hear on any record released this century. Wong operates in a zone somewhere between Nile Rodgers and Jimmy Nolen, but he’s not imitating either of them — he’s synthesizing something that sounds entirely like himself. The staccato chops on “Grace” land with a physical authority. You don’t just hear them. You adjust your posture.
Who’s in the Room
The personnel list reads like a dispatch from a very specific corner of Minneapolis funk royalty. Drummer Dillon Natura holds down the low end of the pocket with the kind of restraint that only sounds easy. Bassist Jake Baldwin locks in beneath him in that classic way where the bass and kick drum become a single organism. Keyboardist/vocalist Sam Ryder appears throughout, and his presence adds the vocal dimension that keeps the album from feeling like a technical showcase — which it absolutely could have been, and would have been lesser for it.
Antwaun Stanley shows up on “Brand New” and sounds exactly like what he is: one of the finest soul vocalists working today, criminally underknown outside of funk circles. That track in particular has the feel of a live take where everyone in the room knew it was the one.
The horn section — a rotating cast across the sessions — gives the album its body. These are arrangements that understand horns as texture, not garnish.
The Argument the Album Makes
Wong is making a case here, though he makes it without any apparent urgency. The case is that joy is a legitimate artistic position. That clean production and technical command don’t have to mean cold. That you can love your influences completely and still sound like yourself.
The album’s longest stretches are instrumentals, and they don’t drag. That’s the test. When a rhythm guitarist leads an instrumental record and you never miss a vocalist, the groove is doing its job.
Put this on after nine p.m. with something good to drink. The opening track will make you want to stand up, but you won’t, because you’re too comfortable, and that tension is exactly where this record lives.