B-Side Guys

Serena Rose trained as a film composer before she ever released music under her own name, and “Wild One” makes that background legible almost immediately. She’s described writing it while picturing the same setting on repeat, “creeks, wet forest, fog after rain,” and feeling the music as existing inside that setting, the exact distinction a film score has to make and a plain nature song usually skips entirely.

That logic explains why “Wild One” skips a normal verse-chorus shape, built around drifting guitar lines and minimal percussion. A score doesn’t need a chorus to justify its presence in a scene, only enough presence to hold the room’s temperature. The track came together in one sustained burst of writing, catching a single continuous mood in real time. Guitars spread wide across the stereo field, standing in for the actual physical space of the hinterland she was picturing, doing the work a bridge or a hook might do somewhere else.

Even the word “wild” earns its place literally here, tied to a specific patch of Byron Bay hinterland, the creeks and fog she named precisely enough that the title reads like a location as much as a mood. Rose studied music and audio before moving into screen composition, and carried that training straight into the solo project she launched in 2021. “Wild One” applies the same scoring instinct to a forest that she once applied to a screen. The forest, in other words, gets the same treatment a film once would have.